Enhancing P300 component by spectral power ratio principal components for a single trial brain-computer interface

Here we present a novel approach to detect P300 wave in single trial Visual Event Related Potential (VERP) signals using improved principal component analysis to enable a faster brain-computer interface (BCI) design. In the process, the principal components (PCs) are selected using novel methods, namely spectral power ratio (SPR) and sandwich spectral power ratio (SSPR). We set out to assess the improved performances of our proposed methods, SPR and SSPR over standard PC selection methods like Kaiser and residual power for speller BCI design. Concluding, the P300 parameters extracted through our proposed SPR and SSPR methods showed improved detection of target characters in the speller BCI. © 2008 Science Publications.