Pengfei Sun

Pengfei Sun, Jorg De Winne, Paul Devos et al.

Decoding EEG signals is crucial for unraveling human brain and advancing brain-computer interfaces. Traditional machine learning algorithms have been hindered by the high noise levels and inherent inter-person variations in EEG signals. Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown promise, owing to their advanced nonlinear modeling capabilities. However, DNN still faces challenge in decoding EEG samples of unseen individuals. To address this, this paper introduces a novel approach by incorporating the conditional identification information of each individual into the neural network, thereby enhancing model representation through the synergistic interaction of EEG and personal traits. We test our model on the WithMe dataset and demonstrated that the inclusion of these identifiers substantially boosts accuracy for both subjects in the training set and unseen subjects. This enhancement suggests promising potential for improving for EEG interpretability and understanding of relevant identification features.

Pengfei Sun, Gopala K. Anumanchipalli, Edward F. Chang

Decoding language representations directly from the brain can enable new Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) for high bandwidth human-human and human-machine communication. Clinically, such technologies can restore communication in people with neurological conditions affecting their ability to speak. In this study, we propose a novel deep network architecture Brain2Char, for directly decoding text (specifically character sequences) from direct brain recordings (called Electrocorticography, ECoG). Brain2Char framework combines state-of-the-art deep learning modules --- 3D Inception layers for multiband spatiotemporal feature extraction from neural data and bidirectional recurrent layers, dilated convolution layers followed by language model weighted beam search to decode character sequences, optimizing a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. Additionally, given the highly non-linear transformations that underlie the conversion of cortical function to character sequences, we perform regularizations on the network's latent representations motivated by insights into cortical encoding of speech production and artifactual aspects specific to ECoG data acquisition. To do this, we impose auxiliary losses on latent representations for articulatory movements, speech acoustics and session specific non-linearities. In 3 participants tested here, Brain2Char achieves 10.6\%, 8.5\% and 7.0\% Word Error Rates (WER) respectively on vocabulary sizes ranging from 1200 to 1900 words. Brain2Char also performs well when 2 participants silently mimed sentences. These results set a new state-of-the-art on decoding text from brain and demonstrate the potential of Brain2Char as a high-performance communication BCI.

Pengfei Sun, Jun Qin

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural network (NN) based EEG-speech (NES) modeling framework, in which three network structures are developed to map imagined EEG signals to phonemes. The proposed NES models incorporate a language model based EEG feature extraction layer, an acoustic feature mapping layer, and a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) based the feature learning layer. The NES models can jointly realize the representation of multichannel EEG signals and the projection of acoustic speech signals. Among three proposed NES models, two augmented networks utilize spoken EEG signals as either bias or gate information to strengthen the feature learning and translation of imagined EEG signals. Experimental results show that all three proposed NES models outperform the baseline support vector machine (SVM) method on EEG-speech classification. With respect to binary classification, our approach achieves comparable results relative to deep believe network approach.

Pengfei Sun, Jun Qin

In this letter, we propose enhanced factored three way restricted Boltzmann machines (EFTW-RBMs) for speech detection. The proposed model incorporates conditional feature learning by multiplying the dynamical state of the third unit, which allows a modulation over the visible-hidden node pairs. Instead of stacking previous frames of speech as the third unit in a recursive manner, the correlation related weighting coefficients are assigned to the contextual neighboring frames. Specifically, a threshold function is designed to capture the long-term features and blend the globally stored speech structure. A factored low rank approximation is introduced to reduce the parameters of the three-dimensional interaction tensor, on which non-negative constraint is imposed to address the sparsity characteristic. The validations through the area-under-ROC-curve (AUC) and signal distortion ratio (SDR) show that our approach outperforms several existing 1D and 2D (i.e., time and time-frequency domain) speech detection algorithms in various noisy environments.

Pengfei Sun, Jun Qin

In this study, we propose a modulation decoupling based single channel speech enhancement subspace framework, in which the spectrogram of noisy speech is decoupled as the product of a spectral envelop subspace and a spectral details subspace. This decoupling approach provides a method to specifically work on elimination of those noises that greatly affect the intelligibility. Two supervised low-rank and sparse decomposition schemes are developed in the spectral envelop subspace to obtain a robust recovery of speech components. A Bayesian formulation of non-negative factorization is used to learn the speech dictionary from the spectral envelop subspace of clean speech samples. In the spectral details subspace, a standard robust principal component analysis is implemented to extract the speech components. The validation results show that compared with four speech enhancement algorithms, including MMSE-SPP, NMF-RPCA, RPCA, and LARC, the proposed MS based algorithms achieve satisfactory performance on improving perceptual quality, and especially speech intelligibility.