Emotion Classification from EEG with a Low-Cost BCI Versus a High-End Equipment

Abstract

The assessment of physiological signals such as the electroencephalography (EEG) has become a key point in the research area of emotion detection. This study compares the performance of two EEG devices, a low-cost brain–computer interface (BCI) (Emotiv EPOC+) and a high-end EEG (BrainVision), for the detection of four emotional conditions over 20 participants. For that purpose, signals were acquired with both devices under the same experimental procedure, and a comparison was made under three different scenarios, according to the number of channels selected and the sampling frequency of the signals analyzed. A total of 16 statistical, spectral and entropy features were extracted from the EEG recordings. A statistical analysis revealed a major number of statistically significant features for the high-end EEG than the BCI device under the three comparative scenarios. In addition, different machine learning algorithms were used for evaluating the classification performance of the features extracted from high-end EEG and low-cost BCI in each scenario. Artificial neural networks reported the best performance for both devices with an F[Formula: see text]-score of 75.08% for BCI and 98.78% for EEG. Although the professional EEG outcomes were higher than the low-cost BCI ones, both devices demonstrated a notable performance for the classification of the four emotional conditions.