Functional Connectivity and Feature Fusion Enhance Multiclass Motor-Imagery Brain-Computer Interface Performance

(1) Background: in the field of motor-imagery brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs), obtaining discriminative features among multiple MI tasks poses a significant challenge. Typically, features are extracted from single electroencephalography (EEG) channels, neglecting their interconnections, which leads to limited results. To address this limitation, there has been growing interest in leveraging functional brain connectivity (FC) as a feature in MI-BCIs. However, the high inter- and intra-subject variability has so far limited its effectiveness in this domain. (2) Methods: we propose a novel signal processing framework that addresses this challenge. We extracted translation-invariant features (TIFs) obtained from a scattering convolution network (SCN) and brain connectivity features (BCFs). Through a feature fusion approach, we combined features extracted from selected channels and functional connectivity features, capitalizing on the strength of each component. Moreover, we employed a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) model to classify the extracted features. (3) Results: using a public dataset (IIa of the BCI Competition IV), we demonstrated that the feature fusion approach outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, we found that the best results were achieved by merging TIFs with BCFs, rather than considering TIFs alone. (4) Conclusions: our proposed framework could be the key for improving the performance of a multiclass MI-BCI system.