Optimal EEG feature extraction using DWT for classification of imagination of hands movement

An optimal feature selection and extraction procedure is an important task that significantly affects the success of brain activity analysis in brain-computer interface (BCI) research area. In this paper, a novel method for extracting the optimal feature from electroencephalogram (EEG) signal is proposed. At first, a student’s-t-statistic method is used to normalize and to minimize statistical error between EEG measurements. And, 2D time-frequency data set from the raw EEG signal was extracted using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) as a raw feature, standard deviations and mean of 2D time-frequency matrix were extracted as a optimal EEG feature vector along with other basis feature of sub-band signals. In the experiment, data set 1 of BCI competition IV are used and classification using SVM to prove strength of our new method.