IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 51, NO.

6, JUNE 2004

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BCI Competition 2003Data Set IIb: Enhancing

P300 Wave Detection Using ICA-Based Subspace
Projections for BCI Applications
Neng Xu*, Xiaorong Gao, Bo Hong, Xiaobo Miao, Shangkai Gao, Senior Member, IEEE, and Fusheng Yang

AbstractAn algorithm based on independent component

analysis (ICA) is introduced for P300 detection. After ICA decomposition, P300-related independent components are selected
according to the a priori knowledge of P300 spatio-temporal
pattern, and clear P300 peak is reconstructed by back projection
of ICA. Applied to the dataset IIb of BCI Competition 2003, the
algorithm achieved an accuracy of 100% in P300 detection within
five repetitions.
Index TermsBraincomputer interface (BCI), independent
component analysis, infomax, P300 detection.

I. INTRODUCTION

RAINCOMPUTER interface (BCI) is one kind of

humancomputer interface which enables the direct
communication between human and computers by analyzing
electroencephalographic activities that reflect the functions of
the brain [1]. In 1988, Farwell and Donchin first introduced
P300 potential into BCI [2]. The P300 speller paradigm used
to produce the dataset IIb of BCI Competition 2003 [3] is
basically the same as that of Farwell and Donchins [4].
In P300 speller, the key task is to detect the P300 peaks in
electroencephalography (EEG) accurately and instantly, which
ensures the high transfer rate of bit information between human
brains and computers.
In a P300-based BCI system, P300 components are usually
detected using signal enhancement and pattern recognition on
the basis of ensemble averaging of several EEG trials. Farwell
and Donchin introduced some P300 detection methods for BCI
such as stepwise discriminant analysis (SWDA), peak picking,
area, and covariance in 1988 [2], and Donchin added discrete
wavelet transform (DWT) to the SWDA [4]. In general, the more
the averaged trials, the higher the accuracy and reliability will
be. However, it is at the expense of longer transfer time. The
communication rate determined by both accuracy and transfer
time is a primary index in BCI assessment. Therefore, a good

Manuscript received June 29, 2003; revised December 1, 2003. This work
is supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant 60205003 and in part by the National 863 Project of China under Grant
2001AA422310. Asterisk indicates corresponding author.
*N. Xu is with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: xuneng01@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn).
X. Gao, B. Hong, S. Gao, and F. Yang are with the Department of Biomedical
Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: gxr-dea@tsinghua.edu.cn).
X. Miao is with the College of Electrical Engineering, Chongqing University,
Chongqing 400044, China.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TBME.2004.826699

algorithm for BCI should ensure the high accuracy and reduce
the transfer time to achieve a high transfer rate.
Independent component analysis (ICA) is a general-purpose
statistical technique closely related to the method called
blind source separation [5]. It is a signal processing method
attempting to recover a set of independent sources when only
mixtures from these sources, the multichannel observations, are
given. Not very long after the appearance of ICA, it has been
broadly applied to biomedical signal and image processing,
such as analysis of electrocardiography (ECG) [6], [7], EEG
[8], [9], [10], magnetoencephalography (MEG) [11], [12],
and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) [13]. ICA
was first applied to event-related potential (ERP) analysis by
Makeig et al. [9] in 1997. Studies on neuroscience indicate that
ERPs like P300 can be considered to basically satisfy the three
assumptions of ICA application: 1) independence of sources;
2) linearity of sources mixing; and 3) time invariance of mixing
model. The source-demixing idea of ICA also matches the goal
of source-pursuing in ERP study. Hence, the application of
ICA into P300 analysis is a valuable and promising approach.
The ICA-based algorithm with temporal and spatial manipulation of independent components (ICs) is proposed for
a P300 speller paradigm in BCI Competition 2003. First, we
decompose the multichannel EEG data into ICs by ICA, then
we make the manipulative selection of the ICs based on the
a priori knowledge of P300 spatio-temporal pattern, and finally
project them back to the scalp. Through these steps, the SNR of
P300 in the reconstructed scalp EEG is enhanced and P300 is
easier to be detected. The main idea is that we get a clear P300
by separating ICs of evoked potential with ICA and retaining
those P300-related parts according to the a priori knowledge
of P300. Meanwhile, some preprocessing methods such as
bandpass filtering and principal component analysis (PCA)
[18] are also necessary for signal enhancement, which increase
the computational efficiency and the robustness of ICA.
II. METHODS
A. P300 Extraction by Temporal and Spatial Manipulation
of Independent Components
Three steps are included for P300 extraction by temporal and
spatial manipulation of independent components: decomposition of signals into ICs with ICA, manipulative selection of ICs
in time and space domains, and back projection from manipulated IC matrix to scalp EEG data. The block diagram of these
steps is shown in Fig. 1.

0018-9294/04$20.00 2004 IEEE

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Fig. 1.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 51, NO. 6, JUNE 2004

P300 extraction by temporal and spatial manipulation of independent components.

The process within the dashed box in Fig. 1 is invisible, where

independent unknown sources
are linearly mixed into observed signals
(as
. During the
scalp EEG in the ERP case) by matrix
is applied to to get
.
course of demixing, a matrix
can make the different components of mutuIf the matrix
ally independent, may be considered as the estimation of .
Since there are many different contrast functions to measure the
is not unique. In
independence of , this way of pursuing
this paper, the Infomax ICA [15] based on stochastic gradient
learning rules [16] is adopted. Infomax explicitly tries to maximize the joint entropy of a nonlinear function of the separated
outputs ; however, it implicitly minimizes the mutual information between the separated outputs so as to make them mutually independent.
After the decomposition, we make further manipulations of
the ICs in time and space domains.
1) Temporal Manipulation of Independent Components: Temporal manipulation of independent components
considers the features of ICs in time domain to decide whether
a component should be kept or wiped off. The latency and
amplitude of the wave crest or wave hollow are commonly used.
For P300 extraction, those ICs with relatively larger amplitude
in the latency range of P300 were kept, while the others were
set to . Here, the latency range was estimated by the averaged
result of the training data as from about 250 to 400 ms.
2) Spatial Manipulation of Independent Components: Spatial manipulation of independent components
is more complex. In general, it decides whether a component
should be kept or wiped off according to the spatial distribution
of ICs and the a priori physiological knowledge. Denote the
th row th column element in
(the inverse matrix of )
, then
by
..
.

..

..
.

..

..
.

..
.

..
.

..

..
.

..

..
.

..
.
(1)

Denote the th column of

by . It reflects the intensity
[9]. For convedistribution at each electrode of the th IC
nience of manipulation of ICs in space domain, we transform
into an intensity order matrix
the spatial pattern matrix
with the same dimension. The value of the element
in
is set to be the order number of the value
in the column
of
. For example, if
is the largest element in
vector
. If
is the second largest element
column , then,

, and so on. According to the spatial

in column , then
of indistribution of brain activities, an electrode set
terest is selected in which is the index number of electrodes
and is equal to the row index of the multichannel EEG matrix
. For P300 potential extracting, these electrodes should be selected at the vertex region (Cz, C1, C2), because, as shown by
our preliminary investigation, P300 is most prominent over this
region. The rule of spatial manipulation of ICs is given by
else

(2)

where

is the threshold of order admission. For example, set

, then only the ICs satisfying the following condition can
be retained: the electrode corresponding to the largest element
belongs to the selected electrode set; if
of its spatial pattern
, the ICs with the electrodes corresponding to one or
set
both of the largest two elements belong to the selected set are
retained, and so on. is introduced to keep the most prominent spatial information about P300. After the manipulation,
holds most of the source information about P300, other irrelevant parts are set to .
3) Back Projection: After the temporal and spatial manipulation of ICs, the vector of the manipulated components are
to obtain
back projected to scalp by back projection with
the scalp distribution of P300 potential, i.e.,
(3)
where

is the P300 enhanced EEG for feature extraction.

B. Algorithm for P300 Speller

Fig. 2 is the diagram of the algorithm developed for P300
speller of BCI Competition 2003. The data provided by
Wadsworth center consist of three sessions: session 10 and 11
for training, session 12 for testing. Each session consists of
several runs with one run for a word. For each character in a
word, there are 15 blocks of data with 12 trials in each block,
and the 12 trials in each block are marked by 12 different
StimulusCodes corresponding to six row and six column intensifications [3]. Our algorithm consists of two phases: training
phase and testing phase. For a specific subject, the demixing
is treated as a fixed one, which is obtained in training
matrix
phase and used in testing phase as a temporal-spatial filter.
1) Training Phase: The task of this phase is to obtain the
by training the specific preprocessed data
demixing matrix
with ICA. Only a few trials in the training set were selected and
then processed as illustrated in Fig. 2(a).
a) Bandpass filtering: Through spectrum analysis, we found
that the principal energy of P300 was concentrated in the

XU et al.: BCI COMPETITION 2003DATA SET IIb: ENHANCING P300 WAVE DETECTION

Fig. 2.

Algorithm for P300 speller: demixing matrix of

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W is obtained in training phase and used in testing phase as a spatial-temporal filter.

frequency band of 28 Hz, so the raw data were passed

through a 28-Hz bandpass filter first.
b) Ensemble averaging: The data with the same StimulusCode were averaged. Every trial lasts from 0 to 650 ms
from the beginning of stimulation.
c) Data concatenating: Before ICA training, the selected
training data from different trials were concatenated by
channel. Originally, the ratio of target trials to nontarget
trials is 1 : 5. To increase the proportion of target trials,
all the target trials and randomly picked nontarget trials
were concatenated randomly with ratio 1 : 2.
d) Dimensionality reduction (PCA): As is conventionally
accepted in ERP study, number of ICs in VEP is around
1535 [17]. Since there are 64 channels of EEG in the
original data, PCA was chosen as the preprocessing
method to reduce the dimension of the data from 64 to
22, about 1/3 of 64. PCA was applied to the covariance
, where is zero mean.
matrix of data
The 64 eigenvalues were sorted in descending order
was constructed by their
and the eigenvector matrix
corresponding eigenvalues. The dimension reducing is
(22 64) is the first 22
made according to (4) where
rows of
(4)
e) ICA training: After PCA, Infomax (ICA) was applied to
the dimension reduced training data . A 22 22 matrix
is obtained after ICA training. Postmultiplied by
as illustrated in (5), a 22 64 spatial filtering matrix
is obtained finally

(5)
It is equivalent to the demixing matrix shown in Fig. 1.
2) Testing Phase: The preprocessing for testing data is the
same as that of training data: first the same bandpass filtering
and then ensemble averaging. After preprocessing, the data matrix was multiplied by the spatial filter obtained from training
phase and 22 ICs are, thus, obtained. After the temporal and spatial manipulation of these ICs as described above, we obtain
that holds most of the information closely related with P300.
with (3) and
Finally, we implement the back projection of
in which P300 is clearer
obtain the enhanced scalp data
than before and easier to detect.

3) Word Prediction: There are several methods to detect the

P300 potential and predict the words in P300 speller. We define a P300 window from 275 to 370 ms, the peak and the area
of waves in the P300 window can both be used for prediction.
Those columns/rows with high score of peak or area are considered as the candidates. The target character was determined by
searching the column and row with the highest score of peak or
area.
III. RESULTS
To confirm the a priori knowledge of P300 used in the section
on spatial and temporal manipulation, the time and space distributions of P300 were investigated. Data from run 2 of session 10
was taken as an example. Fig. 3(a) is the averaged wave on Cz
with dashed line for target and solid line for nontarget. Fig. 3(b)
is the topography at six time points: 220, 270, 320, 370, 420, and
470 ms. Fig. 3 indicates that the principal component of P300 is
located at the vertex region with a latency of about 350 ms. The
a priori knowledge we employed in the previous section was,
thus, confirmed.
Temporal and spatial manipulation of ICs is the major means
for P300 enhancement in our algorithm. The remarkable enhancement of P300 is illustrated in Fig. 4. Fig. 4(a) shows 12
response curves corresponding to the 12 StimulusCodes, which
have been bandpass filtered and averaged. The two thick lines
are target responses, while the other ten thin lines are nontarget
responses. Actually, these 12 curves have no distinct difference
and it is hard to detect P300 from them directly. The results after
the manipulation of ICs are illustrated in Fig. 4(b), where the
two thick lines (the target responses) can be differentiated distinctly from the other ten thin lines (the nontarget responses)
and the latter superpose each other on time axis with very small
amplitude. The algorithm extracts the interested responses very
effectively.
Applying the proposed algorithm to P300 speller data of BCI
Competition 2003, an accuracy of 100% was achieved on testing
set. On the training set with 42 characters, the only error appeared in run 2 of session 11 with letter G instead of H. The
detailed results are illustrated in Table I.
Due to the perfect accuracy of testing set, we were announced
to be one of the winners in the competition. Ensuring 100%
accuracy, we reduced the trials in ensemble averaging to increase
the transfer rate. Before the deadline of the competition, we
obtained the 100% accuracy with the first eight trials. The
least number of consecutive trials needed was five when the
selection of starting point was allowed.

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Fig. 3.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 51, NO. 6, JUNE 2004

A priori spatio-temporal knowledge of P300: principal component of P300 is located at vertex region with a latency of about 350 ms.

Fig. 4. Response curves before and after the temporal and spatial manipulation of independent components. Target P300 responses are enhanced while the
nontarget responses are suppressed.

IV. DISCUSSION
Signal enhancement based on ICA plays a very important role
in our algorithm. Actually, after P300 enhancement, little effort is needed to classify the target and nontarget responses. In
a conventional case of P300 detection, spatio-temporal features

of P300 should be carefully selected to train the classifier. Here,

we only selected a time window around 300 ms (where the P300
peak was located as shown by the averaged results of training
data) and a small set of electrodes on the vertex scalp and applied them to the manipulative selection of ICs. In a sense, our
algorithm is a kind of gray-box, which is different from other

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TABLE I
ACCURACY OF CHARACTER PREDICTION

give the same results can also be used as an exiting condition,

etc. These conditions can be used together to determine whether
a good prediction result is obtained. Applying the above procedures to the competition data set, with maxblock set to 8, the
average number of blocks for correctly predicting a character
was found to be 4.97 with an accuracy of 100%.
V. CONCLUSION
Fig. 5.

Flow chart of dynamic averaging.

pattern recognition methods. Thus, it can be easily combined

with other classification methods.
A special way of using ICA is put forth in this paper.
Instead of using it as a data dependent signal decomposition
method, a two-step method is employed here. ICA is applied
to the training data first to find the demixing matrix. Then, this
matrix is applied directly to the testing data as a spatio-temporal
filter instead of finding the demixing matrix once more. In
the case of ERP, the mixing model is determined by volume
conduction through the cerebrospinal fluid, skull, and scalp,
which is thought to be relatively spatially stable. Since the
whole dataset IIb of BCI Competition 2003 was collected
from the same subject, it is reasonable to treat the demixing
matrix as a relatively stable one, which has been proved by
our results of P300 extraction.
After finding demixing matrix by ICA, there is no dense computation in the testing phase, which prompts us to increase the
transfer rate by dynamically determining the number of trials to
be averaged. In general, with the same accuracy, the fewer trials
used, the higher transfer rate we obtain. As shown in Fig. 5,
after adding each trial of data to be averaged, we check whether
the exiting conditions are satisfied (in P300 speller, this means
a good result for word prediction is obtained). If the exiting
conditions are satisfied, the averaging is stopped and the character is predicted immediately. Dynamic determining of averaging trials may reduce the required time, especially when the
data have good quality. When the exiting conditions are still not
satisfied after all the blocks (or predefined maximum number
of blocks, denoted as maxblock) are used, the character will be
predicted according to the final averaging data. Adopting these
approaches, the average time needed for every word prediction
can, thus, be reduced.
The key problem here is how to choose the exiting condition.
We can not affirmatively tell which conditions are the most robust and effective. One possible choice is that the ratio of the
highest score to the second highest score is bigger than a specific value, or when (usually,
) consecutive predictions

A novel algorithm for P300 detection based on ICs is proposed and a perfect accuracy is achieved in the competition.
ICA decomposes the multichannel EEG into ICs, which makes
it possible to select those components spatially and temporally
related to P300. The ICA method based on statistical information theory and the a priori physiological knowledge are intimately combined and proved to be effective in BCI application.
The idea of temporal and spatial manipulation of ICs can be utilized not only to the extraction of P300, but also to the extraction
and analysis of such evoked potential as VEP which has clear
potential distribution in time and space domains [14].
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are thankful for the experiments and datasets
provided by Wadsworth Center. They would also like to thank
B. Blankertz and other organizers of BCI Competition 2003.
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Bo Hong was born in Jiangsu, China, in 1972. He

received the B.E. degree and the Ph.D. degree in
biomedical engineering from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in 1996 and 2001, respectively.
He is now an Assistant Research Professor
with the Department of Biomedical Engineering,
Tsinghua University. His research interests include
signal processing and neuro-engineering.

Xiaobo Miao was born in Sichuan Province, China,

in 1974. He received the B.E. degree in automation from Zhengzhou University of Technology,
Zhengzhou, China, in 1998 and the M.E. degree in
electrical engineering from Chongqing University,
Chongqing, China, in 2001. He is currently working
toward the Ph.D. degree at the College of Electrical
Engineering, Chongqing University.
His research interests include biomedical signal
processing, brain-computer interface, and financial
time series analysis.

Neng Xu was born in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China,

in 1980. He received the B.E. degree in biomedical
engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing,
China, in 2001. He is currently working toward the
M.S. degree at the same university.
His research interests include braincomputer interface and biomedical signal processing.

Shangkai Gao (SM94) received the B.S. degree in

electrical engineering in 1970 and the M.E. degree in
biomedical engineering in 1982, both from Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China.
She is currently a Professor in the Department
of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University.
Her research interests include biomedical signal
processing and medical ultrasound.
Prof. Gao is an Associate Editor for IEEE
TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING.

Xiaorong Gao was born in Beijing, China, in

1963. He received the B.S. degree in biomedical
engineering from Zhejiang University in 1986, the
M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from Peking
Union Medical College in 1989, and the Ph.D.
degree in biomedical engineering from Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China, in 1992.
He has been working at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University since 1992.
His current research interests include biomedical
signal processing and medical instrumentation.

Fusheng Yang received the B.S. degree in electrical

engineering from Amoy University, Fukien, China,
in 1949.
Since 1951, he has been a faculty member of the
Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China, where he has held the
rank of Professor since 1980. He is the author of
Biomedical Signal Processing (Higher Education
Press, China, 1989) and Engineering Analysis of
Wavelet Transform and its Application (Science
Press, China, 1998). His current research interests
include the application of spatial analysis, time-frequency, time-scale analysis,
and nonlinear dynamics analysis to biomedical signals.