Gated transformer for decoding human brain EEG signals

In this work, we propose to use a deep learning framework for decoding the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of human brain activities. More specifically, we learn an end-to-end model that recognizes natural images or motor imagery by the EEG data that is collected from the corresponding human neural activities. In order to capture the temporal information encoded in the long EEG sequences, we first employ an enhanced version of Transformer, i.e., gated Transformer, on EEG signals to learn the feature representation along a sequence of embeddings. Then a fully-connected Softmax layer is used to predict the classification results of the decoded representations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the gated Transformer approach, we conduct experiments on the image classification task for a human brain-visual dataset and the classification task for a motor imagery dataset. The experimental results show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance compared to multiple existing methods that are widely used for EEG classification.