Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) aim to detect target frequencies corresponding to specific commands in electroencephalographic (EEG) signals by classification algorithms to achieve the desired control. However, SSVEP signals suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio and large differences in brain activity. Moreover, the existing CNN models have small receptive fields, which make it difficult to receive large range of feature information and limit the effectiveness of classification algorithms.

To this end, we proposed a high-order temporal convolutional neural network (HOT-CNN) model for enhancing the performance of SSVEP target recognition. Specifically, the SSVEP-EEG signals was divided into equal-length time segments and a time-slice attention module was designed to capture the correlation between time slices. The module improves the local characterization of signals and reduces biological noise interference by automatically assigning high weights to locally relevant temporal sampling cues and lower weights to other temporal cues. Moreover, for global features, a temporal convolutional network module was designed to increases the receptive field of the network and to extract more comprehensive time domain features by using dilated causal convolution. Finally, the fusion and analysis of local and global features are achieved by designing a feature fusion and classification module to accomplish accurate classification of SSVEP signals.

Our method was evaluated on large publicly available datasets containing 35 subjects and 40 categories. Experimental results indicated that HOT-CNN achieved encouraging performance compared with other advanced methods: the highest information transfer rate of 241.01bits/min was obtained using 0.5s stimuli, and the highest average accuracy of 96.39% was obtained using 1.0s stimuli.

The method effectively reinforced the global and local time-domain information and improved the classification performance of SSVEP, which has wide application prospects.