Title : Analaysis and Classification of Evoked Potentials of Familiar and Unfamiliar Face Stimuli

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is an electrical brain activity recorded from the electrodes placed on the skull surface. Evoked potential (EP) is an activity emerging in response to a specific stimulus in EEG. These potentials recorded from the brain are not only used in diagnosis of some diseases but also have recently been used in the design of applications enabling brain’s interaction with computers and the environment. Examples of the applications that can enable this interaction using brain’s electrical activity are artificial limbs design, brain-computer design, oddball paradigm design and cerebral forensic inquiry design applications.

In this study, familiar and unfamiliar face stimuli images were shown to different participants in different sessions during EEG recording and the acquired EEG data was analyzed and classified utilizing different methods. Analysis process comprised following stages respectively: pre-processing, feature extraction, channel selection, and classification and different methods were tried in each stage. The best classification performance was obtained when low-pass filter and Discrete Cosine Transform were used at the pre-processing stage, Piecewise Constant Modeling was used at the feature extraction stage, Mutual Information was used at the channel selection stage and Support Vector Machine techniques was used at the classification stage. At the end of classification, the study tried to determine brain electric activities in response to familiar and unfamiliar face stimuli.

Consequently, this study will help us both in the pre-diagnosis of diseases such as Prosopagnosia and Alzheimer and in determining suspects’ behavior in response to a face stimulus related to a crime instance in forensic inquiries.

Images of Familiar Face Stimuli
Images of Unfamiliar Face Stimuli

Related Journal Papers:
1. Özbeyaz, A., Arıca, S. Familiar/unfamiliar face classification from EEG signals by utilizing pairwise distant channels and distinctive time interval. SIViP 12, 1181–1188 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-018-1269-x
2. Özbeyaz, A., and Arica, S. Classification of EEG signals of familiar and unfamiliar face stimuli exploiting most discriminative channels. TURKISH J. Electr. Eng. Comput. Sci., 25, 3342–3354. (2017)

Related Conference Papers:
1. A. Özbeyaz and S. Arica, “Evoked potential in response to familiar and unfamiliar face Stimuli and their time-location analysis,” in 2015 19th National Biomedical Engineering Meeting (BIYOMUT), Nov. 2015, pp. 1–4, doi: 10.1109/BIYOMUT.2015.7369457.
2. A. Özbeyaz and S. Arica, “Comparison of channel selection methods on the classification of EEG data obtained from the animal non-animal categorization experiment,” in 2015 23nd Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SIU), May 2015, pp. 172–175, doi: 10.1109/SIU.2015.7130432.