Graph Neural Networks on SPD Manifolds for Motor Imagery Classification: A Perspective from the Time-Frequency Analysis

Motor imagery (MI) classification is one of the most widely-concern research topics in Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) with extensive industry value. The MI-EEG classifiers' tendency has changed fundamentally over the past twenty years, while classifiers' performance is gradually increasing. In particular, owing to the need for characterizing signals' non-Euclidean inherence, the first geometric deep learning (GDL) framework, Tensor-CSPNet, has recently emerged in the BCI study. In essence, Tensor-CSPNet is a deep learning-based classifier on the second-order statistics of EEGs. In contrast to the first-order statistics, using these second-order statistics is the classical treatment of EEG signals, and the discriminative information contained in these second-order statistics is adequate for MI-EEG classification. In this study, we present another GDL classifier for MI-EEG classification called Graph-CSPNet, using graph-based techniques to simultaneously characterize the EEG signals in both the time and frequency domains. It is realized from the perspective of the time-frequency analysis that profoundly influences signal processing and BCI studies. Contrary to Tensor-CSPNet, the architecture of Graph-CSPNet is further simplified with more flexibility to cope with variable time-frequency resolution for signal segmentation to capture the localized fluctuations. In the experiments, Graph-CSPNet is evaluated on subject-specific scenarios from two well-used MI-EEG datasets and produces near-optimal classification accuracies.