Cross-Subject Transfer Learning for Boosting Recognition Performance in SSVEP-Based BCIs

Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been substantially studied in recent years due to their fast communication rate and high signal-to-noise ratio. The transfer learning is typically utilized to improve the performance of SSVEP-based BCIs with auxiliary data from the source domain. This study proposed an inter-subject transfer learning method for enhancing SSVEP recognition performance through transferred templates and transferred spatial filters. In our method, the spatial filter was trained via multiple covariance maximization to extract SSVEP-related information. The relationships between the training trial, the individual template, and the artificially constructed reference are involved in the training process. The spatial filters are applied to the above templates to form two new transferred templates, and the transferred spatial filters are obtained accordingly via the least-square regression. The contribution scores of different source subjects can be calculated based on the distance between the source subject and the target subject. Finally, a four-dimensional feature vector is constructed for SSVEP detection. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a publicly available dataset and a self-collected dataset were employed for performance evaluation. The extensive experimental results validated the feasibility of the proposed method for improving SSVEP detection.