TPHFC-Net—A Triple-Path Heterogeneous Feature Collaboration Network for Enhancing Motor Imagery Classification

Electroencephalography-based motor imagery (EEG-MI) classification is a cornerstone of Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) systems, enabling the identification of motor intentions by decoding neural patterns within EEG signals. However, conventional methods, predominantly reliant on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are proficient at extracting local temporal features but struggle to capture long-range dependencies and global contextual information. To address this limitation, we propose a Triple-path Heterogeneous Feature Collaboration Network (TPHFC-Net), which synergistically integrates three distinct temporal modeling pathways: a multi-scale Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to capture fine-grained local dynamics, a Transformer branch to model global dependencies via multi-head self-attention, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to track sequential state evolution. These heterogeneous features are subsequently fused adaptively by a dynamic gating mechanism. In addition, the model’s robustness and discriminative power are further augmented by a lightweight front-end denoising diffusion model for enhanced noisy feature representation and a back-end prototype attention mechanism to bolster the inter-class separability of non-stationary EEG features. Extensive experiments on the BCI Competition IV-2a and IV-2b datasets validate the superiority of the proposed model, achieving mean classification accuracies of 82.45% and 89.49%, respectively, on the subject-dependent MI task and significantly outperforming existing mainstream baselines.