A hybrid method based on time–frequency images for classification of alcohol and control EEG signals

Abstract

Classification of alcoholic electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is a challenging job in biomedical research for diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases of alcoholic people. The aim of this study was to introduce a robust method that can automatically identify alcoholic EEG signals based on time–frequency (T–F) image information as they convey key characteristics of EEG signals. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid method to classify automatically the alcoholic and control EEG signals. The proposed scheme is based on time–frequency images, texture image feature extraction and nonnegative least squares classifier (NNLS). In T–F analysis, the spectrogram of the short-time Fourier transform is considered. The obtained T–F images are then converted into 8-bit grayscale images. Co-occurrence of the histograms of oriented gradients (CoHOG) and Eig(Hess)-CoHOG features are extracted from T–F images. Finally, obtained features are fed into NNLS classifier as input for classify alcoholic and control EEG signals. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we replace the NNLS classifier by artificial neural networks, k-nearest neighbor, linear discriminant analysis and support vector machine classifier separately, with the same features. Experimental outcomes along with comparative evaluations with the state-of-the-art algorithms manifest that the proposed method outperforms competing algorithms. The experimental outcomes are promising, and it can be anticipated that upon its implementation in clinical practice, the proposed scheme will alleviate the onus of the physicians and expedite neurological diseases diagnosis and research. © 2016, The Natural Computing Applications Forum.