Enhancing Computational Efficiency of Motor Imagery BCI Classification with Block-Toeplitz Augmented Covariance Matrices and Siegel Metric

Abstract: Electroencephalographic signals are represented as multidimensional datasets. We introduce an enhancement to the augmented covariance method (ACM), exploiting more thoroughly its mathematical properties, in order to improve motor imagery classification.Standard ACM emerges as a combination of phase space reconstruction of dynamical systems and of Riemannian geometry. Indeed, it is based on the construction of a Symmetric Positive Definite matrix to improve classification. But this matrix also has a Block-Toeplitz structure that was previously ignored. This work treats such matrices in the real manifold to which they belong: the set of Block-Toeplitz SPD matrices. After some manipulation, this set is can be seen as the product of an SPD manifold and a Siegel Disk Space.The proposed methodology was tested using the MOABB framework with a within-session evaluation procedure. It achieves a similar classification performance to ACM, which is typically better than -- or at worse comparable to -- state-of-the-art methods. But, it also improves consequently the computational efficiency over ACM, making it even more suitable for real time experiments.