Multiscale Convolutional Transformer With Diverse-Aware Feature Learning for Motor Imagery EEG Decoding

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have significant potential in improving motor function for neurorehabilitation. Despite recent advancements, learning diversified EEG features across different frequency ranges remains a significant challenge, as the homogenization of feature representations often limits the generalization capabilities of EEG decoding models for BCIs. In this article, we propose a novel multiscale convolutional transformer framework for EEG decoding that integrates multiscale convolution, transformer, and diverse-aware feature learning scheme (MCTD) to tackle the above challenge. Specifically, we first capture multiple frequency features using dynamic one-dimensional temporal convolution with different kernel lengths. Subsequently, we incorporate convolutional layers and transformers with a contrastive learning scheme to extract discriminative local and global EEG features within a single frequency range. To mitigate the homogenization of features extracted from different frequency ranges, we propose a novel decorrelation regularization. It enables multiscale convolutional transformers to produce less correlated features with each other, thereby enhancing the overall expressiveness of EEG decoding model. The performance of MCTD is evaluated on four public MI-based EEG datasets, including the BCI competition III 3a and IV 2a, the BNCI 2015-001, and the OpenBMI. For the average Kappa/Accuracy scores, MCTD obtains improvements of 3.58%/2.68%, 3.09%/2.20%, 2.33%/1.54%, and 4.44%/2.22%, over the state-of-the-art method on four EEG datasets, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our method exhibits superior performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/kfhss/MCTD.