DSGF-Net: A Lightweight Dual-Stream Gated Fusion Network for Cross-Subject fNIRS Motor Task Classification

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has become an important signal source in motor imagery (MI) brain–computer interface research due to its non-invasive nature and high application flexibility. However, fNIRS signals exhibit significant inter-subject variability, complementary information from oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR), and complex spatiotemporal dynamics, making their efficient and robust classification challenging. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Dual-Stream Gated Fusion Network (DSGF-Net). This model employs a dual-branch architecture to perform complementary feature modeling of fNIRS signals: one branch focuses on extracting multi-scale temporal dynamic features, while the other learns the spatial distribution of hemodynamic features across channels, thereby effectively characterizing the signals from different perspectives. Upon this foundation, a gated fusion mechanism was designed to adaptively adjust the importance of different feature dimensions after the fusion of the two feature streams, thereby enhancing the discriminative power of the fused representation. On two public datasets, MI and UFFT, experimental results based on leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation show that the proposed method achieves competitive performance across metrics such as classification accuracy, F1-score, and Kappa coefficient. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of performance under different network component configurations validates the contributions of the dual-branch structure and the gated fusion mechanism to performance improvements. Furthermore, complexity analysis results show that DSGF-Net achieves superior classification performance while maintaining a relatively small parameter size, striking a good balance between performance and computational complexity. DSGF-Net provides an effective, lightweight deep learning framework for offline fNIRS-based motor task classification, with potential applications in cross-subject BCI systems and brain signal decoding.