EEGDnet: Fusing non-local and local self-similarity for EEG signal denoising with transformer

Electroencephalogram (EEG) has shown a useful approach to produce a brain–computer interface (BCI). One-dimensional (1-D) EEG signal is yet easily disturbed by certain artifacts (a.k.a. noise) due to the high temporal resolution. Thus, it is crucial to remove the noise in received EEG signal. Recently, deep learning-based EEG signal denoising approaches have achieved impressive performance compared with traditional ones. It is well known that the characteristics of self-similarity (including non-local and local ones) of data (e.g., natural images and time-domain signals) are widely leveraged for denoising. However, existing deep learning-based EEG signal denoising methods ignore either the non-local self-similarity (e.g., 1-D convolutional neural network) or local one (e.g., fully connected network and recurrent neural network). To address this issue, we propose a novel 1-D EEG signal denoising network with 2-D transformer, namely EEGDnet. Specifically, we comprehensively take into account the non-local and local self-similarity of EEG signal through the transformer module. By fusing non-local self-similarity in self-attention blocks and local self-similarity in feed forward blocks, the negative impact caused by noises and outliers can be reduced significantly. Extensive experiments show that, compared with other state-of-the-art models, EEGDnet achieves much better performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Specifically, EEGDnet can achieve 18% and 11% improvements in correlation coefficients when removing ocular artifacts and muscle artifacts, respectively.