Steady-State Visual-Evoked-Potential–Driven Quadrotor Control Using a Deep Residual CNN for Short-Time Signal Classification

In this paper, we study the classification problem of short-time-window steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) and propose a novel deep convolutional network named EEGResNet based on the idea of residual connection to further improve the classification performance. Since the frequency-domain features extracted from short-time-window signals are difficult to distinguish, the EEGResNet starts from the filter bank (FB)-based feature extraction module in the time domain. The FB designed in this paper is composed of four sixth-order Butterworth filters with different bandpass ranges, and the four bandwidths are 19-50 Hz, 14-38 Hz, 9-26 Hz, and 3-14 Hz, respectively. Then, the extracted four feature tensors with the same shape are directly aggregated together. Furthermore, the aggregated features are further learned by a six-layer convolutional neural network with residual connections. Finally, the network output is generated through an adaptive fully connected layer. To prove the effectiveness and superiority of our designed EEGResNet, necessary experiments and comparisons are conducted over two large public datasets. To further verify the application potential of the trained network, a virtual simulation of brain computer interface (BCI) based quadrotor control is presented through V-REP.