Eye-blink artifact removal in single-channel electroencephalogram using K-means and Savitzky Golay-singular Spectrum Analysis hybrid technique.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) acquisition systems are used to record the neural condition of humans for diagnosing various neural problems. The eye-blink or Electrooculogram (EOG) artifact caused by eye-lid movements, influences the EEG signal measurements and interferes with the diagnosis. The complete removal of eye-blink artifact while preserving the EEG content is a challenging task that needs highly efficient denoising methods, particularly from Single-Channel EEG which is widely used for Out-Of-Hospital (OOH) neurological patients and for Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) applications. When compared to multi-channel EEG systems, Single-channel EEG system suffers certain difficulties such as lack of spatial information, redundancy, etc. This paper proposes an innovative hybrid method combining K-Means clustering and Savitzky Golay-Singular Spectrum Analysis (SG-SSA) methods for effective eye-blink artifact removal from single channel EEG. The eye-blink artifact is extracted and then subtracted from the noisy EEG signal, so that the EEG content available in the eye-blink periods are preserved. Through extensive experiments with synthetic as well as real time EEG, we show that our proposed method outperforms the other contemporary methods from literature. Our proposed hybrid approach achieves a significant reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Relative Root Mean Square Error (RRMSE) than the Fourier-Bessel Series Expansion based Empirical Wavelet Transform (FBSE-EWT), SSA combined with independent component analysis (SSA-ICA) and Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition combined with ICA (EEMD-ICA), proposed in recent literature.