Automatic EEG eyeblink artefact identification and removal technique using independent component analysis in combination with support vector machines and denoising autoencoder

This study proposes a novel combination of independent component analysis (ICA) in conjunction with support vector machine (SVM) and denoising autoencoder (DA), for the first time, for removal of eyeblink artefacts from the corrupted electroencephalography (EEG). At first the eyeblink corrupted EEG signals are decomposed into independent components (ICs) using ICA, the corrupted‐ICs are then identified using SVM as a classifier. From the corrupted‐ICs, the artefacted segment is identified with a second SVM classifier and corrected by the pre‐trained DA. Finally, inverse‐ICA operation is applied on the remaining ICs and the corrected ICs to obtain the artefact‐free EEG signal. The proposed methodology modifies only the portion corrupted with artefacts, and does not alter the uncorrupted part, thereby preserving the neural information in the original EEG. The proposed methodology was implemented to remove eyeblinks from the EEG data collected from the publicly available EEGLab data set. The results reveal that the proposed methodology is superior to the other recently reported methods in terms of the mutual information and average correlation coefficient. Further, the proposed method is automatic and does not require any intervention of the operator, whereas the other methods require intervention of the user.