EEG Emotion Classification Based on Graph Convolutional Network

EEG-based emotion recognition is a task that uses scalp-EEG data to classify the emotion states of humans. The study of EEG-based emotion recognition can contribute to a large spectrum of application fields including healthcare and human–computer interaction. Recent studies in neuroscience reveal that the brain regions and their interactions play an essential role in the processing of different stimuli and the generation of corresponding emotional states. Nevertheless, such regional interactions, which have been proven to be critical in recognizing emotions in neuroscience, are largely overlooked in existing machine learning or deep learning models, which focus on individual channels in brain signals. Motivated by this, in this paper, we present RGNet, a model that is designed to learn the regional level representation of EEG signal for accurate emotion recognition. Specifically, after applying preprocessing and feature extraction techniques on raw signals, RGNet adopts a novel region-wise encoder to extract the features of channels located within each region as input to compute the regional level features, enabling the model to effectively explore the regional functionality. A graph is then constructed by considering each region as a node and connections between regions as edges, upon which a graph convolutional network is designed with spectral filtering and learned adjacency matrix. Instead of focusing on only the spatial proximity, it allows the model to capture more complex functional relationships. We conducted experiments from the perspective of region division strategies, region encoders and input feature types. Our model has achieved 98.64% and 99.33% for Deap and Dreamer datasets, respectively. The comparison studies show that RGNet outperforms the majority of the existing models for emotion recognition from EEG signals.