Effects of Different Preprocessing Pipelines on Motor Imagery-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

In recent years, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) leveraging electroencephalography (EEG) signals for the control of external devices have garnered increasing attention. The information transfer rate of BCI has been significantly improved by a lot of cutting-edge methods. The exploration of effective preprocessing in brain-computer interfaces, particularly in terms of identifying suitable preprocessing methods and determining the optimal sequence for their application, remains an area ripe for further investigation. To address this gap, this study explores a range of preprocessing techniques, including but not limited to independent component analysis, surface Laplacian, bandpass filtering, and baseline correction, examining their potential contributions and synergies in the context of BCI applications. In this extensive research, a variety of preprocessing pipelines were rigorously tested across four EEG data sets, all of which were pertinent to motor imagery-based BCIs. These tests incorporated five EEG machine learning models, working in tandem with the preprocessing methods discussed earlier. The study's results highlighted that baseline correction and bandpass filtering consistently provided the most beneficial preprocessing effects. From the perspective of online deployment, after testing and time complexity analysis, this study recommends baseline correction, bandpass filtering and surface Laplace as more suitable for online implementation. An interesting revelation of the study was the enhanced effectiveness of the surface Laplacian algorithm when used alongside algorithms that focus on spatial information. Using appropriate processing algorithms, we can even achieve results (92.91% and 88.11%) that exceed the SOTA feature extraction methods in some cases. Such findings are instrumental in offering critical insights for the selection of effective preprocessing pipelines in EEG signal decoding. This, in turn, contributes to the advancement and refinement of brain-computer interface technologies.