Reevaluating performance in c-VEP BCIs: The impact of calibration time

• Calibration duration is critical for balancing accuracy, speed, and visual comfort in c-VEP-based BCIs. • Two datasets involving non-binary codes and spatial frequency variations in checkerboard-like stimuli have been made publicly available. • Achieving 95 % decoding accuracy within 3 s requires an average calibration of 15 s for binary stimuli and 98 s for non-binary stimuli. • A minimum 1-minute calibration is crucial to achieve a stable estimation of the c-VEP response using the reference processing pipeline. Code-modulated visual evoked potentials (c-VEP) have demonstrated high performance in non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Recently, research has begun to consider practical aspects such as visual comfort, where non-binary sequences and variations in the spatial frequency of stimuli play significant roles. However, calibration requirements remain underexplored in performance comparisons. This study aims to analyze a multi-variable tradeoff crucial to the practical application of c-VEP-based BCIs: decoding accuracy, decoding speed, and calibration time. Visual comfort is retrospectively evaluated using two pre-recorded datasets. Models were trained with increasing calibration cycles and tested across varying decoding times, depicting learning and decoding curves. The datasets comprised 32 healthy subjects, and featured different stimulus paradigms: plain non-binary stimuli and checkerboard-like binary stimuli with spatial frequency variations. Results showed that all conditions achieved over 97 % grand-averaged accuracy with sufficient calibration. However, a clear tradeoff emerged between calibration duration and performance. Achieving 95 % average accuracy within a 2 s decoding window required mean calibration durations of 28.7 ± 19.0 s for binary stimuli, or 148.7 ± 72.3 s for non-binary stimuli. The binary checkerboard-based condition with a spatial frequency of 1.2 c/º (C016) proved to be particularly effective, achieving over 95 % accuracy within 2 s decoding window using only 7.3 s of calibration, and reporting a significant improvement in visual comfort. A minimum calibration time of 1 min was considered essential to adequately estimate the brain response, critical in template-matching paradigms. In conclusion, achieving optimal c-VEP performance requires balancing calibration duration, decoding speed and accuracy, and visual comfort.