Translating Mental Imaginations into Characters with Codebooks and Dynamics-Enhanced Decoding

Abstract: Advancements in non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology have enabled communication through brain activity, offering significant potential for individuals with motor impairments. Existing methods for decoding characters or words from EEG recordings either rely on continuous external stimulation for high decoding accuracy or depend on direct intention imagination, which suffers from reduced discrimination ability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel EEG paradigm based on mental tasks that achieves high discrimination accuracy without external stimulation. Specifically, we propose a codebook in which each letter or number is associated with a unique code that integrates three mental tasks, interleaved with eye-open and eye-closed states. This approach allows individuals to internally reference characters without external stimuli while maintaining reasonable accuracy. For enhanced decoding performance, we apply a Temporal-Spatial-Latent-Dynamics (TSLD) network to capture latent dynamics of spatiotemporal EEG signals. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed EEG paradigm which achieves five times higher accuracy over direct imagination. Additionally, the TSLD network improves baseline methods by approximately 8.5%. Further more, we observe consistent performance improvement throughout the data collection process, suggesting that the proposed paradigm has potential for further optimization with continued use.