The event-related desynchronization/synchronization(ERD/ERS) time courses of lower and upper alpha band rhythms during hand motor imagery are investigated respectively by Fourier Sectral Entropy (FSE) in this paper. By analyzing one group of BCI competition data, it was found that FSE within upper alpha band displays a pronounced increase and decrease over contralateral and ipsilateral brain areas respectively at the onset of hand motor imagery, which is corresponding to the antagonistic ERD/ERS patterns in previous studies. Different from the upper alpha activity pattern, FSE within lower alpha band displays a consistent increase over both two hemispheres hand representative areas. The preliminary results show that FSE could disclose the different behaviors of the upper and lower alpha band rhythms so that a new idea with the complexity measure is provided to characterize functional dissociation of lower and upper frequency alpha rhythms in relation to hand motor imagery.
Mental task classification is one of the most important problems in Brain-computer interface.This paper studies the classification of five-class mental tasks.The nonlinear parameter of mean period obtained from frequency domain information was used as features for classification implemented by using the method of SVM(support vector machines).The averaged classification accuracy of 85.6% over 7 subjects was achieved for 2-second EEG segments.And the results for EEG segments of 0.5s and 5.0s compared favorably to those of Garrett's.The results indicate that the parameter of mean period represents mental tasks well for classification.Furthermore,the method of mean period is less computationally demanding,which indicates its potential use for online BCI systems.