Common spatio-temporal pattern for single-trial detection of event-related potential in rapid serial visual presentation triage

Searching for target images in large volume imagery is a challenging problem and the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) triage is potentially a promising solution to the problem. RSVP triage is essentially a cortically-coupled computer vision technique that relies on single-trial detection of event-related potentials (ERP). In RSVP triage, images are shown to a subject in a rapid serial sequence. When a target image is seen by the subject, unique ERP characterized by P300 are elicited. Thus, in RSVP triage, accurate detection of such distinct ERP allows for fast searching of target images in large volume imagery. The accuracy of the distinct ERP detection in RSVP triage depends on the feature extraction method, for which the common spatial pattern analysis (CSP) was used with limited success. This paper presents a novel feature extraction method, termed common spatio-temporal pattern (CSTP), which is critical for robust single-trial detection of ERP. Unlike the conventional CSP, whereby only spatial patterns of ERP are considered, the present proposed method exploits spatial and temporal patterns of ERP separately, providing complementary spatial and temporal features for high accurate single-trial ERP detection. Numerical study using data collected from 20 subjects in RSVP triage experiments demonstrates that the proposed method offers significant performance improvement over the conventional CSP method (corrected p-value < 0.05, Pearson r = 0.64) and other competing methods in the literature. This paper further shows that the main idea of CSTP can be easily applied to other methods.