Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2025): APRIL | JTIE : Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering

Calibration-Light Subject-Independent Motor Imagery BCI via Self-Supervised Pretraining and Conformer

Qiyou Wu (Artificial Intelligence, Northeastern University, MA, USA)
Gaotian Mi (Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, MD, USA)
Dan Wood (Computer Engineering, Dartmouth College, NH, USA)



Article Info

Publish Date
25 Apr 2025

Abstract

Motor imagery (MI) electroencephalography (EEG) is a foundational paradigm for non-invasive brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). However, its practical adoption is constrained by time-consuming per-user calibration and limited cross-subject generalization. This study evaluates a calibration-light MI-BCI framework that combines self-supervised masked EEG pretraining with a lightweight Conformer fine-tuning model. Experiments were conducted on BCI Competition IV Dataset 2b using only the labeled sessions 01T–03T, with artifact-annotated trials removed according to the official 1023 markers. Three deployment-relevant settings were examined: within-subject evaluation (01T–02T → 03T), strict leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) evaluation, and few-shot adaptation with k = 1/5/10 trials per class from the held-out subject’s screening sessions. Full within-subject benchmarking included CSP+LDA, EEGNet, DeepConvNet, ShallowFBCSPNet, supervised Conformer, and SSL+Conformer, while the subject-independent and few-shot analyses focused on CSP+LDA, EEGNet, supervised Conformer, and SSL+Conformer. In the fully calibrated setting, the best mean accuracy was obtained by ShallowFBCSPNet (62.23% ± 14.16%), whereas SSL+Conformer achieved 54.85% ± 11.15% and slightly outperformed the supervised Conformer (53.56% ± 8.81%). Under strict LOSO, EEGNet achieved the highest mean accuracy (52.92% ± 8.25%), while SSL+Conformer reached 51.56% ± 7.18%. In few-shot adaptation, SSL+Conformer achieved the highest mean accuracy at k = 10 (52.84% ± 7.64%) among the core calibration-light methods. The proposed model had a size of 0.1329 MB, a median CPU latency of 0.8777 ms/trial, and LOSO calibration values of ECE = 0.0630 and Brier = 0.4995. These results indicate that masked EEG pretraining provides a competitive lightweight baseline and is most useful when a modest amount of target-subject calibration data is available.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jtie

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

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