Extraction of steady state visually evoked potential signal and estimation of distribution map from EEG data.

We propose a signal extraction method from multi-channel EEG signals and apply to extract Steady State Visually Evoked Potential (SSVEP) signal. SSVEP is a response to visual stimuli presented in the form of flushing patterns. By using several flushing patterns with different frequency, brain machine (computer) interface (BMI/BCI) can be realized. Therefore it is important to extract SSVEP signals from multi-channel EEG signals. At first, we estimate the power of the objective signal in each electrode. Estimation of the power is helpful in not only extraction of the signal but also drawing a distribution map of the signal, finding electrodes which have large SNR, and ranking electrodes in sort of information with respect to the power of the signal. Experimental results show that the proposed method 1) estimates more accurate power than existing methods, 2) estimates the global signal which has larger SNR than existing methods, and 3) allows us to draw a distribution map of the signal, and it conforms the biological theory.