A Comprehensive Review of Hardware Acceleration Techniques and Convolutional Neural Networks for EEG Signals

Abstract

This paper comprehensively reviews hardware acceleration techniques and the deployment of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) signals across various application areas, including emotion classification, motor imagery, epilepsy detection, and sleep monitoring. Previous reviews on EEG have mainly focused on software solutions. However, these reviews often overlook key challenges associated with hardware implementation, such as scenarios that require a small size, low power, high security, and high accuracy. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of hardware acceleration for wearable EEG devices by focusing on these aspects. Specifically, this review classifies EEG signal features into five groups and discusses hardware implementation solutions for each category in detail, providing insights into the most suitable hardware acceleration strategies for various application scenarios. In addition, it explores the complexity of efficient CNN architectures for EEG signals, including techniques such as pruning, quantization, tensor decomposition, knowledge distillation, and neural architecture search. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic review that combines CNN hardware solutions with EEG signal processing. By providing a comprehensive analysis of current challenges and a roadmap for future research, this paper provides a new perspective on the ongoing development of hardware-accelerated EEG systems.