A lightweight spiking neural network for EEG-based motor imagery classification

Abstract

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) aim to simulate the human brain neural network, using sparse spike event streams for effective and energy-efficient spatio-temporal signal processing. This paper proposes a lightweight SNN model for electroencephalogram (EEG) based motor imagery (MI) classification, a classical brain-computer interface paradigm. The model has three desirable characteristics: (1) it has a brain-inspired architecture; (2) it is energy efficient; and, (3) it is dataset agnostic. Within-subject and cross-subject experiments on three public datasets demonstrated the superiority of our SNN model over four classical convolutional neural network based models in EEG based MI classification.

Keywords: Brain–computer interface; Deep learning; Motor imagery; Spiking neural network.