Multiclass Brain–Computer Interface Classification by Riemannian Geometry

This paper presents a new classification framework for brain-computer interface (BCI) based on motor imagery. This framework involves the concept of Riemannian geometry in the manifold of covariance matrices. The main idea is to use spatial covariance matrices as EEG signal descriptors and to rely on Riemannian geometry to directly classify these matrices using the topology of the manifold of symmetric and positive definite (SPD) matrices. This framework allows to extract the spatial information contained in EEG signals without using spatial filtering. Two methods are proposed and compared with a reference method [multiclass Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)] on the multiclass…