Short time Fourier transformation and deep neural networks for motor imagery brain computer interface recognition

Motor imagery (MI) is an important control paradigm in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI), which enables the recognition of personal intention. So far, numerous methods have been designed to classify EEG signal features for MI task. However, deep neural networks have been seldom applied to analyze EEG signals. In this study, two novel kinds of deep learning schemes based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) were proposed for MI-classification. The frequency domain representations of EEG signals were obtained using short time Fourier transform (STFT) to train models. Classification results were compared between conventional algorithm, CNN, and LSTM models. Compared with two other methods, CNN algorithms had shown better performance. These conclusions verified that CNN method was promising for MI-based BCIs.