To provide speech prostheses for individuals with severe communication impairments, we investigated a classification method for brain computer interfaces (BCIs) using silent speech. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded using scalp electrodes when five subjects imagined the vocalization of Japanese vowels, /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/ in order and in random order, while the subjects remained silent and immobilized.
For actualization, we tried to apply relevance vector machine (RVM) and RVM with Gaussian kernel (RVM-G) instead of support vector machine with Gaussian kernel (SVM-G) to reduce the calculation cost in the use of 19 channels, common special patterns (CSPs) filtering, and adaptive collection (AC). Results show that using RVM-G instead of SVM-G reduced the ratio of the number of efficient vectors to the number of training data from 97% to 55%. At this time, the averaged classification accuracies (CAs) using SVM-G and RVM-G were, respectively, 77% and 79%, showing no degradation. However, the calculation cost was more than that using SVM-G because RVM-G necessitates high calculation costs for optimization. Furthermore, results show that CAs using RVM-G were weaker than SVM-G when the training data were few. Additionally, results showed that nonlinear classification was necessary for silent speech classification.
This paper serves as a beginning of feasibility study for speech prostheses using an imagined voice. Although classification for silent speech presents great potential, many feasibility problems remain. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.