| Summary: | Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has attracted increasing attention in the field of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) owing to their advantages such as non-invasiveness, user safety, affordability, and portability. However, fNIRS signals are highly subject-specific and have low test-retest reliability. Therefore, individual calibration sessions need to be employed before each use of fNIRS-based BCI to achieve a sufficiently high performance for practical BCI applications. In this study, we propose a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach for implementing a subject-independent fNIRS-based BCI. A total of 18 participants performed the fNIRS-based BCI experiments, where the main goal of the experiments was to distinguish a mental arithmetic task from an idle state task. Leave-one-subject-out cross-validation was employed to evaluate the average classification accuracy of the proposed subject-independent fNIRS-based BCI. As a result, the average classification accuracy of the proposed method was reported to be 71.20 ± 8.74%, which was higher than the threshold accuracy for effective BCI communication (70%) as well as that obtained using conventional shrinkage linear discriminant analysis (65.74 ± 7.68%). To achieve a classification accuracy comparable to that of the proposed subject-independent fNIRS-based BCI, 24 training trials (of approximately 12 min) were necessary for the traditional subject-dependent fNIRS-based BCI. It is expected that our CNN-based approach would reduce the necessity of long-term individual calibration sessions, thereby enhancing the practicality of fNIRS-based BCIs significantly.
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