Temporal convolutional transformer for EEG based motor imagery decoding

Abstract

Abstract Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on motor imagery (MI) offer a transformative pathway for rehabilitation, communication, and control by translating imagined movements into actionable commands. However, accurately decoding motor imagery from electroencephalography (EEG) signals remains a significant challenge in BCI research. In this paper, we propose TCFormer, a temporal convolutional Transformer designed to improve the performance of EEG-based motor imagery decoding. TCFormer integrates a multi-kernel convolutional neural network (MK-CNN) for spatial-temporal feature extraction with a Transformer encoder enhanced by grouped query attention to capture global contextual dependencies. A temporal convolutional network (TCN) head follows, utilizing dilated causal convolutions to enable the model to learn long-range temporal patterns and generate final class predictions. The architecture is evaluated on three benchmark motor imagery and motor execution EEG datasets: BCIC IV-2a, BCIC IV-2b, and HGD, achieving average accuracies of 84.79, 87.71, and 96.27%, respectively, outperforming current methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated design in addressing the inherent complexity of EEG signals. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/altaheri/TCFormer.