Proceedings oE the 9th International ConEerence on InEormation Technology and

Applications in Biomedicine, ITAB 2009, Larnaca, cyprus, 5-7 November 2009

REG-leA:
A New Hybrid Method for EOGArtifact Rejection
Manousos A. Klados, Christos L. Papadelis, Panagiotis D. Bamidis
X\ [I , .. ,n] '1'\[1, .. ,n]
Raw
Regres
EEG
Recon
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EOG
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biological/physiological. The most frequently seen
physiological artifacts are due to ocular, heart or muscular
activity. Ocular artifacts, such as eye blinks, are the most
troublesome among the biological artifacts.
The ocular signal stems from the fact that the cornea is
positively charged with reference to the retina. This
retinocorneal potential difference generates a dipole within
the eye - ball, and, therefore, ocular artifacts are in due to
the reorientation of the aforementioned dipole [I] .
Fig, I Block diagram ofthe REG-ICA approach.
The eye - blinking artifacts could also be the result of
alternations in conductance arising from the contact of the
eyelid with the cornea [2]. All the signals derived from
ocular activity can be measured by placing electrodes near
the eyes; this type of measurement is called
electrooculogram (EOG).
A variety of algorithms have been proposed for the
detection and correction of EOG artifacts. These algorithms
can be separated into two main classes. The first class is
composed by regression - based techniques. According to
this methodology, the regression - based methods compute
the amplitude relationship between the EEG and EOG
channels in order to define the backward propagation
coefficients and fmally subtract the EOG from the EEG
signals.
On the other hand, Blind Source Separation (BSS)
methods, like Independent Component Analysis (ICA) have
the ability to separate EEG signals into statistically
independent components (lCs); specialists are then called to
identify the artifactual ICs, which are then algorithmically
removed; finally, the signal is reconstruct so as to be free of
artifacts [3]. The major disadvantage of BSS - based
methodologies is that an artifactual component contains also
neural activity aside from pure artifacts; thus the removal of
the contaminated ICs leads to the distortion of the
underlying cerebral signals.
The current study, tries to deal with the aforementioned
disadvantage by demonstrating the use of the regression
analysis in order to remove only EOG artifacts from ICs
keeping the neural activity intact. A block diagram of the
proposed automatic approach is shown in Fig.I . According
to this, leA is applied in raw EEG signals decomposing
Keywords- Artifact Rejection, Independent Component
Analysis (ICA), Regression, Electroencephalogram (EEG),
Electroculogram (EOG)
Abstract-The plethora of Artifact Rejection (AR)
techniques proposed for removing electrooculographic (EOG)
artifacts from electroencephalographic (EEG) signals can be
separated into two main categories. The first category is
composed of regression - based methods, while the second one
consists of Blind Source Separation (BSS) - methods. A major
disadvantage of BSS- based methodology is that the artifactual
components include also neural activity, thus their rejection
leads to the distortion of the underlying cerebral activity. The
current study tries to solve the aforementioned problem by
proposing a new hybrid algorithm for EOG AR. According to
this automatic approach, called REG-ICA, Independent
Component Analysis (ICA) is used to decompose EEG signals
into spatial independent components (ICs). Then an adaptive
filter, based on a stable Version of the Recursive Least Square
(sRLS) algorithm, is applied to ICs so as to remove only EOG
artifacts and maintain the neural signals intact. Then the
cleaned ICs are projected back, reconstructing the artifact -
free EEG signals. In order to evaluate the performance of the
proposed technique, REG-ICA has been compared with the
Least Mean Square (LMS) approach, in simulated EEG data.
Two criteria were used for the comparison: how successfully
algorithms remove eye blinking artifacts, and how much the
EEG signals are distorted. Results support the argument that
REG-ICA removes successfully EOG activity, while it
minimizes the distortion of the underlying cerebral activity in
contrast to LMS.
M.A. Klados is with the Group of Applied Neuroscience, Lab of Medical
Informatics, Medical School, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,
Thessaloniki, CO 54124 Greece (e-mail: mklados@med.auth.gr).
C.L. Papadelis is with Center for BrainlMind Sciences (CIMEC),
University of Trento, Mattarello, Trentino, Italy (e-mail:
christos.papadelis@unitn.it).
P.D. Bamidis is with the Group of Applied Neuroscience, Lab of
Medical Informatics, Medical School, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki ,
Thessaloniki, CO 54124 Greece (corresponding author to provide phone:
30-2310-999310; fax: 30-2310-999263; e-mail: bamidis@med.auth.gr).
I. INTRODUCTION
N
owadays electroencephalography (EEG) is commonly
used for understanding cerebral functions as much as
for evaluating neuronal abnormalities, brain injuries
and disorders. Artifacts are the outstanding enemy of high
quality encephalography and their presence may seriously
affect the Event Related Potentials (ERP) analysis or the
epileptic seizure spikes. Artifacts originate from two major
source categories: artificial/technical and
978-1-4244-5379-5/09/$26.00 200 9 IEEE
II. MATERIALS AND METHODS
C. REG-ICA Algorithm
A widely used version of ICA decomposes signals to
statistical independent components using an information
them to statistical independent components; then a
regression algorithm is used in order to remove only ocular
artifacts from ICs. The filtered ICs are then projected back,
reconstructing the artifact - free EEG signals.
So the remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In
section II methodological background is provided alongside
a detailed description of the proposed herein
method/algorithm. Section III consists of tables and
illustrations of the results; the latter are fmally discussed in
last two sections ofthe paper.
A. Independent Component Analysis
A BSS model assumes that a set of recordings of p
random variables u(t) = [ul(t), ...,Up(t)]T are linear mixtures
of q independent source signals. Therefore, the BSS model
which describes the aforementioned process of mixing the
ICs can be described by:
u(t) =A set) + n(t) (1)
where A is a [p x q] matrix and n(t) denotes an additive
vector of white noise. The least information required for this
model is that the source signals should be independent. A
BSS algorithm fmds the ICs without a priori knowledge of
the mixing process or the source signals. Furthermore two
additional assumptions have to be met in order to retrieve
correctly the ICs: the number of source signals has to be at
most equal to the number of recordings and the mixing
matrix has to be full column-rank.
maximization algorithm [4]. According to this approach,
maximizing the joint entropy H(y) of the output of a neural
processor minimizes the mutual information among the ICs.
An extended version of ICA [3], to super - sub Gaussian
signals, was used in the proposed AR technique in order to
extract ICs.
Our approach lies in the assumption, that the independent
components are contaminated by EOG artifacts according to
the linear model described in (2). An adaptive filter based on
a stable version of the Recursive Least Square (sRLS)
algorithm was used in order to filter the ICs. sRLS was
adopted because it fmds the contamination coefficients that
relate to recursively producing the least squares of the error
signal. A full description of the sRLS algorithm is available
in [5].Table 1 summarizes the REG-ICA algorithm.
TABLE I
SUMMARY OF REG-leA ALGORITHM
D. Semi-Simulated Data
Fifty four multichannel artifact - free EEG (pure EEG)
and EOG datasets were obtained from twenty seven healthy
subjects. Each dataset lasts thirty seconds. The EEG signals
were recorded, while subjects had their eyes closed before
and after an emotion evocative - stimuli experiment, from
nineteen electrodes, which were placed according to the 10-
20 International System. More specifically electrodes were
placed at Fpl, Fp2, F3, F4, F7, F8, Fz, C3, C4, Cz, T3, T4,
T5, T6, P3, P4, Pz, 01, 02. Electrodes with odd indices
were referenced to the left mastoid and electrodes with even
indices were referenced to the right mastoid. Central
electrodes (Fz,Cz, Pz) were referenced to the half of the sum
of left and right mastoid. The EOG signals were recorded,
while subjects had their eyes opened before and after the
aforementioned experiment. Two EOG electrodes were
placed above and below the left eye and another two on the
outer canthi of each eye. From these electrodes two bipolar
signals were obtained, namely, vertical-EOG (VEOG),
which is equal to upper minus lower electrode values and
horizontal-EOG, which is equal to left minus right EOG
electrode values. The sampling frequency is 200 Hz. A
band-pass filter in the frequency band between 0.5 and 40
Hz was applied to EEG datasets, while the EOG signals
were filtered in the frequency band between 0.5 and 13 Hz
3. Reconstruct the signals by multiplying the ICs with the
inverse of the mixing matrix
1. Apply ICA to decompose EEG signals to statistically
independent components. (Computation of the mixing
matrix)
2. Filter the ICs with the sRLS adaptive filter. (Remove only
ocular artifacts)
sRLS Parameters:
p =the order of adaptive filter (here p =3 )
A= forgetting factor (here A= 0.9999 )
a =value to initialize P(O) (here a =0.01 )
Input: Contaminated EEG and two (2) EOG channels as a
reference (VEOG, HEOG)
Output: Clean EEG.
(4) lim EEG. = EEG
" 1 1
a i ~ a i
b i ~ b i
B. Regression Algorithm
Each regression - based AR technique, uses the following
linear model (2) to calculate the relationship between the
observed EOG and EEG signals and tries to approximate the
"real" EEG signals by subtracting the EOG signals from the
observed EEG (3).
OBSj = EEGj +ajVEOG +bjHEOG (2)
EEG. =OBS -a.VEOG-b.HEOG (3)
1 1 1 1
where OBSj and EEGj are the observed and the real EEG
signals in the i th electrode. VEOG and HEOG are the
vertical and horizontal EOG signals respectively, while the
contamination coefficients in the i th electrode are denoted
with a
j
and b., Finally the indicator /\ is used to clarify the
approximated variables.
Adaptive filters are based on regression analysis. Their
goal is to adjust the filter coefficients (a
j
, b
j
) and make
them approach the optimal filter coefficients (a
j
, b, ). It
stands that:
Relat ive Error
Bli nk Segment
2900 2950 3000 3050
Time (Samp le Poi nts)

- REG-ICA
- LMS
- Pure EEG
0.6
Correlation Coefficient - Relative Error
TABLE II
SUMMARY OFANOVA RESULTS
0.4
Fig. 2 Blink Segment: Green and black lines depict contaminated EEG and
pure EEG signals respectively, while blue and red lines illustrate the
cleaned EEG with REG-ICA and LMS respectivel y. REG-ICA gives a
better approximation of pure EEG signals than LMS.
Performance
Indices
Statistics
REG-leA LMS
(mean:l:SD) (mean:l:SD)
Correlation F=53,799
-0.102:1:0.045 0.036:1:0.009
Coefficient p=O.OOO
Root Mean F=9,296
4.825:1:4.37 5.368:1:3.66
SQuareError p<0.002
Relative Error
F=81,420
0.337:1:0104 0.535:1:0.122
p=O.OOO
(6)
(7)
(8)
Corr =-;===========
RMSE=u..:.::'-'-------
N
L(PEEG
i
- CEEG
i)2
i =\
N
RE = II CEEG- PEEGI12
IICEEGI12
One-way ANOVA was employed to examine possible
statistical significant differences among the algorithm's
performance in each of the aforementioned indices
[6]. Finally a notch filter at 50 Hz for line noise extraction
was applied to both EEG and EOG datasets.
Pure EEG signals were infected by EOG artifacts
according to the following formula :
CEEGi, j =PEEGi,j +cj(VEOG+HEOG) (5)
where CEEGand PEEG are the contaminated and pure EEG
respectively. The vector Cj denotes the contamination
coefficients, while i and j are the subject and electrode
numbers respectively.
E. Evaluation ofPerformance
REG-ICA was compared with the Least Mean Square
(LMS) adaptive filter algorithm, which proved to have better
performance among other widely used AR techniques [7].
Two criteria were used for the comparison: how successfully
algorithms remove eye blinking artifacts, and how much the
EEG signals are distorted after the AR procedure. In order to
quantify the first criterion the correlation coefficient index
(6) between the cleared Fp I and VEOG signals was
computed.
Fp\-VEOG

where - denotes the inner product. Finally the second
criterion was justified by the Root Mean Square Error (7) in
time domain and the relative error (8) among the cleared
(CEEG) and the pure (PEEG ) EEG datasets.
Figures 3 and 4 illustrate the one-way ANOVA's results
summarized in Table 2.
Fig. 3 Correlation Coefficient and Relative Error. Coefficient was used in
order to quantify the removal of EOG artifacts while Relative Error was
employed for the evaluation ofEEG distortion.
** p<0.05
LMS
Contaminat ion Coefficient
Methods
REG-leA

0.0
0.2
III. RESULTS
Two independent observers confirmed the successful
removal of all appeared eye-blinks for both algorithms.
Despite this, one-way ANOVA revealed statistically
significant differences for all of the three indices reported in
the previous section. Results are summarized in Table II.
Figure 2 depicts a blink segment from Fp1 electrode. It is
clearly observed that REG-ICA gives a closest
approximation of pure EEG in contrast to LMS. This
suggests that REG-ICA distorts less the underlying cerebral
activity compared to LMS.
10
8
Root Mean Square Error in Time Domain
philosophy because it uses EOG signals as the reference
signals and filters the ICs removing with that way only
ocular artifacts.
A main drawback of the current study is the use of EOG
signals. All BSS-based AR techniques have the ability to
reject ocular artifacts without the need of EOG signals, but
they introduce a substantial distortion of neural activity.
According to our opinion, it is preferable to use more
channels for AR purposes, than distorting the brain
responses .
Further research is necessary for the optimization of the
current AR approach. Different BSS algorithms and
different regression-based adaptive filters may be further
investigated in order to conclude which is the optimal
combination of the regression and BSS methodology. Also
the use of a fast BSS algorithm can promote the REG-ICA's
application to real life processes .
REFERENCES
[I] DA Overton and C. Shagass. "Distribution of eye movement and eye
blink potentials over the scalp," Electroencephalography and Clinical
Neurophysiology, vol. 27, pp. 546, 1969.
[2] F. Matsuo, 1.F. Peters and E.L. Reilly. "Electrical phenomena
associated with movements of the eyelid," Electroenceph . clin.
Neurophysiol. , vol. 38, pp. 507-512,1975.
[3] T.P Jung, C. Humphries, T.W. Lee, S. Makeig, et al. "Extended lCA
Removes Artifacts from Electroencephalographic Recordings,"
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10, M. Jordan et
al. Eds. , MIT Press, Cambridge USA, 1998.
[4] A.J. Bell & TJ. Sejnowski . An information-maximization approach to
blind separation and blind deconvolutiou, Neural Computation
7:1129-1159,1995
[5] P. He, G. Wilson and C. Russell, "Removal of ocular artifacts from
electro-encephalogram by adaptive filtering", Med. BioI. Eng.
Comput. , vol. 42, pp. 407-412, 2004.
[6] O.G. Lins, T.W. Picton, P. Berg and M. Scherg, "Ocular artefacts in
recording EEGs and event-related potentials: II. Source dipoles and
source components ." Brain Topography, vol:6(l), pp. 65-78,1993.
[7] MA Klados, C. L. Papadeli s, C. Lithari and P.D. Bamidis, "The
Removal of Ocular Artifacts From EEG signals: A Comparison of
Performances For Different Methods", 1. Vander Sioten, P. Verdonck,
M. Nyssen, 1. Haueisen (Eds.): ECIFMBE 2008, IFMBE Proceedings
22,pp.1259-1263,2008
[8] N.P. Castellanos and VA Makarov, "Recovering EEG brain signals:
Artifact suppression with wavelet enhanced independent component
analysis," Journal of Neuroscience Methods , vol. 158, pp. 300-312,
2006.
[9] S.C. Ng and P. Raveendran, "Removal of EOG Artifacts Using ICA
Regression Method", NA Abu Osman, F. Ibrahim, WAB. Wan
Abas, H.S. Abd Rahman, H.N. Ting (Eds.) : Biomed 2008,
Proceedings 21, pp. 226-229, 2008
V. CONCLUSIONS
The current study introduced a novel and automatic AR
approach. Results suggest that REG-ICA removes
successfully eye-blinking activity, while it distorts the
underlying cerebral activity less than other AR techniques.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has been benefited by a grant from the Greek
GENERAL SECRETARIAT FOR RESEARCH &
TECHNOLOGY.
REGleA LMS
Methods
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sn
:E 4
n:
o ** p<O.05
IV. DISCUSSION
The majority of the newly proposed BSS-based AR
techniques, concerns the identification of the artifactual
components. All of them remove the artifactual components
by zero-padding the proper elements in the mixing matrix.
As it has been mentioned above this methodology distorts
the underlying neural activity.
Taking into account this, Castellanos and Makarov [8]
proposed a method which relies on ICA, and makes use of
the wavelet theory for recovering the cerebral activity lying
under the artifactual components. However, this method
passes all the components through a thresholding procedure
which cuts out only the high magnitude voltages (like eye-
blinks) . This methodology suffers, especially in cases where
high magnitude voltages are not derived from artifactual
sources, but they are originated from true brain responses
(like epileptic EEG signals). Our approach overcomes this
problem by employing the adaptive filtering procedure
(sRLS) which applies regression on the EOG channels.
Thus, only artifacts related with EOG activity are removed.
Since ocular activity contaminates EEG signals, then
cerebral activity can contaminate the EOG recordings too.
This phenomenon is called bidirectional contamination and
it can seriously affect the performance of regression - based
techniques. The proposed use of regression analysis not on
raw EEG data but on the ICs, overcomes this bidirectional
contamination problem. This happens because artifacts are
concentrated in a few ICs, where the artifact to cerebral
activity ratio is much higher than in the artifact affected
electrodes.
REG-ICA was compared with LMS. The LMS algorithm
was not randomly selected. Previous results [7] suggest that
LMS performs better in removing ocular artifacts compared
to another four AR techniques. According to current results,
REG-ICA performs better -in contrast to LMS- not only in
removing ocular artifacts from EEG signals but also in
distorting less the underlying cerebral activity.
To the best of our knowledge this is the second time
which ICA is combined with regression analysis for AR
purposes. In the first work [9], authors used ICA to
decompose EEG signals to ICs, and then they have used the
artifactual component as the reference signal to a regression-
based AR algorithm. Our approach has a completely diverse
2
Fig. 4 Root Mean Square Error was used in order to quantify the distortion
of the underlying cerebral activity in the time domain.