onEEGwaveLAD: A fully automated online EEG wavelet-based learning adaptive denoiser for artefacts identification and mitigation

Electroencephalographic signals are obtained by amplifying and recording the brain’s spontaneous biological potential using electrodes positioned on the scalp. While proven to help find changes in brain activity with a high temporal resolution, such signals are contaminated by non-stationary and frequent artefacts. A plethora of noise reduction techniques have been developed, achieving remarkable performance. However, they often require multichannel information and additional reference signals, are not fully automated, require human intervention and are mostly offline. With the popularity of Brain-Computer Interfaces and the application of Electroencephalography in daily activities and other ecological settings, there is an increasing need for robust, online, near real-time denoising techniques, without additional reference signals, that is fully automated and does not require human supervision nor multi-channel information. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by introducing onEEGwaveLAD, a novel, fully automated, ONline, EEG wavelet-based Learning Adaptive Denoiser pipeline for artefact identification and reduction. It is a specific framework that can be instantiated for various types of artefacts paving the path towards real-time denoising. As the first of its kind, it is described and instantiated for the particular problem of blink detection and reduction, and evaluated across a general and a specific analysis of the signal to noise ratio across 30 participants.