Artifact removal from EEG signals recorded in non-restricted environment

Abstract Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are always accompanied by endogenous and exogenous artifacts. Research carried out in the past few years focused on EEG artifact removal considered EEG signals recorded in a restricted lab environment. Considering the importance of EEG in daily life activities, no definitive approach is presented in removing blink artifacts from non-restricted EEG recordings. In this paper, a new supervised artifact removal method is proposed that classifies EEG chunks having eye movements and then utilizes independent component analysis and discrete wavelet transform to eliminate the ocular artifacts. The EEG data is acquired from 29 subjects in a non-restricted environment where the subject has to watch videos while walking and giving gestures and facial expressions. Thirteen morphological features are extracted from the recorded EEG signals to classify chunks with eye movements. The EEG chunks with eye movements are further processed to remove noise without distorting the morphology of signals. The proposed method is tested for eye movements and shows an improved performance in terms of correlation, mutual information, phase difference, and computational time over unsupervised modified multi-scale sample entropy and kurtosis, and wavelet enhanced independent component analysis based approaches. Moreover, the computed values of statistical parameters including sensitivity and specificity show the robustness of the proposed scheme.