Steady state visual evoked potential detection using Subclass Marginal Fisher Analysis

Recently, SSVEP detection from EEG signals has attracted the interest of the research community, leading to a number of well-tailored methods, such as Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and a number of variants. Despite their effectiveness, due to their strong dependence on the correct calculation of correlations, these methods may prove to be inadequate in front of potential deficiency in the number of channels used, the number of available trials or the duration of the acquired signals. In this paper, we propose the use of Subclass Marginal Fisher Analysis (SMFA) in order to overcome such problems. SMFA has the power to effectively learn discriminative features of poor signals, and this advantage is expected to offer the appropriate robustness needed in order to handle such deficiencies. In this context, we pinpoint the qualitative advantages of SMFA, and through a series of experiments we prove its superiority over the state-of-the-art in detecting SSVEPs from EEG signals acquired with limited resources.