A hybrid local-global neural network for visual classification using raw EEG signals

EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to decode visual information. Recently, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used to classify EEG signals evoked by visual stimuli. However, methods using ANNs to extract features from raw signals still perform lower than traditional frequency-domain features, and the methods are typically evaluated on small-scale datasets at a low sample rate, which can hinder the capabilities of deep-learning models. To overcome these limitations, we propose a hybrid local-global neural network, which can be trained end-to-end from raw signals without handcrafted features. Specifically, we first propose a reweight module to learn channel weights adaptively. Then, a local feature extraction module is designed to capture basic EEG features. Next, a spatial integration module fuses information from each electrode, and a global feature extraction module integrates overall time-domain characteristics. Additionally, a feature fusion module is proposed to extract efficient features in high sampling rate settings. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on two commonly used small-scale datasets and outperforms baseline methods on three under-studied large-scale datasets. Ablation experimental results demonstrate that the proposed modules have a stable performance improvement ability on multiple datasets across different sample rates, providing a robust end-to-end learning framework.