Emotion recognition using time-frequency ridges of EEG signals based on multivariate synchrosqueezing transform

The feasibility of using time-frequency (TF) ridges estimation is investigated on multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals for emotional recognition. Without decreasing accuracy rate of the valence/arousal recognition, the informative component extraction with low computational cost will be examined using multivariate ridge estimation. The advanced TF representation technique called multivariate synchrosqueezing transform (MSST) is used to obtain well-localized components of multi-channel EEG signals. Maximum-energy components in the 2D TF distribution are determined using TF-ridges estimation to extract instantaneous frequency and instantaneous amplitude, respectively. The statistical values of the estimated ridges are used as a feature vector to the inputs of machine learning algorithms. Thus, component information in multi-channel EEG signals can be captured and compressed into low dimensional space for emotion recognition. Mean and variance values of the five maximum-energy ridges in the MSST based TF distribution are adopted as feature vector. Properties of five TF-ridges in frequency and energy plane (e.g., mean frequency, frequency deviation, mean energy, and energy deviation over time) are computed to obtain 20-dimensional feature space. The proposed method is performed on the DEAP emotional EEG recordings for benchmarking, and the recognition rates are yielded up to 71.55, and 70.02% for high/low arousal, and high/low valence, respectively.