2021 National Conference on Communications (NCC)
Performance Analysis of Convolutional Neural
2021 National Conference on Communications (NCC) | 978-1-6654-4177-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/NCC52529.2021.9530053
2021 IEEE
Network Based EEG Epileptic Seizure Classification
in Presence of Ocular Artifacts
Payal Patel
School of Electrical Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar
Bhubaneswar, Odisha-752050, India.
pa16@iitbbs.ac.in
Abstract—Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has
played a crucial role in classifying epileptic seizures due to its
capability of automatically learning the discriminatory features
from the raw electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Moreover, most
of the existing methods considered artifact-free EEG data for
extracting features. In this paper, we analyze the impact of
ocular artifacts on the performance of CNN in extracting reliable
features from the EEG data for seizure classification. Further-
more, we also analyze the robustness of CNN in determining
the accurate and reliable features not only from raw EEG data
but also from spectral domain EEG data. The performance of
the method is evaluated on the EEG signals taken from the
Bonn’s dataset with different types and levels of ocular artifacts.
Performance evaluation results demonstrate that the classification
accuracy of the method is degraded significantly under the
presence of ocular artifacts. Furthermore, it is observed that the
proposed CNN architecture is able to extract the discriminatory
features from spectral EEG data more accurately as compared
to the raw temporal EEG data.
Keywords—Electroencephalogram (EEG), EEG Decoding, Con-
volutional Neural Network (CNN), Ocular Artifact (OA).
I. I NTRODUCTION
Automated detection of epileptic seizures in electroen-
cephalogram (EEG) signals can avoid the painstaking process
of visual inspection to the long-terms recording by the neu-
rologist and increase the seizure identification accuracy [1]-
[3]. Furthermore, it plays a vital role in analysing neurological
disorders at early stages and can help in diagnosing the patients
in a timely manner. However, presence of background noises,
muscle contraction and relaxation, and other neurological
diseases pose a challenging problem in the automated and
manual seizure identification process [4]–[6]. Therefore, there
is a high demand to develop a robust seizure classification
method which can assist nursing staff for immediate treatment
and drug delivery.
A. Summary of Related Work
Numerous methods based on traditional classifiers and deep
learning techniques have been developed for the detection
and classification of epileptic seizures in the EEG signal
c
978-1-6654-4177-3/21/$31.00
level of ocular artifacts. Section IV concludes the paper.
978-1-6654-4177-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
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Udit Satija
Department of Electrical Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology Patna
Bihta, Bihar-801106, India.
udit@iitp.ac.in
[2]- [25]. Existing traditional machine learning methods are
based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) [1], [2], empirical
wavelet transform (EWT) [7], [9], harmonic wavelet packet
transform [12], discrete cosine transform (DCT) [14], local
mean decomposition (LMD) [3], empirical mode decompo-
sition (EMD) [10], [11], S-transform [8], and discrete short-
time Fourier transform [13]. As deep learning techniques have
revolutionized the task of detection and classification through
identifying the hidden and discriminatory features from the raw
physiological data, a few attempts have been put forward to-
wards EEG signal analysis using convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) [23]- [25]. In [17], CNN along with bidirectional
long-term short memory was used for automatically score
the sleep stages. Also, in [20], CNN was used to score the
sleep stages. In [16], a deep convolution neural network based
seizure classification algorithm was proposed for classifying
the EEG signals into normal, pre-ictal and seizure classes. The
major advantage of CNN is that it can automatically learn and
extract the hidden discriminatory features from the raw EEG
data with few number of convolutional layers. However, the
selection of hyperparameters such as learning rate, batch size,
number of convolutional layers, kernel size, and stride length
plays an important role on the classification accuracy. Most of
the existing methods consider the raw clean EEG data for the
automatic extraction of features using CNNs. To the best of
our knowledge, for the first time, we analyze the performance
of CNN in classifying seizure activity in the EEG signal under
the presence of ocular artifacts (OAs).
B. Contribution of this Paper
In this paper, we demonstrate how the end-to-end decod-
ing of raw EEG becomes challenging in presence of ocular
artifacts. Furthermore, deep ConvNets is learnt using EEG
data in temporal and Fourier domain under the absence and
presence of ocular artifacts to demonstrate the robust learning
invariant to presence of ocular artifacts. The rest of the paper
is structured as follows: Section II describes the proposed
ocular artifact-aware epileptic seizure classification framework.
In Section III, the proposed framework is evaluated with the
EEG data both in temporal and Fourier domain under different
 2021 National Conference on Communications (NCC)

II. P ROPOSED A RTIFACT-AWARE E PILEPTIC S EIZURE is activated by softmax activation function, which gives the
C LASSIFICATION F RAMEWORK probability value for each class and input signal is assigned to
the class having maximum probability. Moreover, the summary
In this section, we present an EEG epileptic seizure classi- of each layer is described in TableI.
fication framework using CNN in presence of ocular artifacts.
In the next subsections, we discuss about the EEG data and
proposed CNN architecture for seizure classification under TABLE I: The Parameters of CNN Architecture
varying ocular artifacts.
Layer Layer Type Filters Filter Stride Activation Output layer
size Function
A. EEG Data 0 Input - - - - 1 × 4096
1 Conv1D 5 1×9 2 reLU 5 × 4088
In this section, we present the description of Bonn’s dataset 2 Sub-sampling - 2 2 - 5 × 2044
on which our method is evaluated. Bonn’s dataset contains 3 Dropout (0.2) - - - - 5 × 2044
4 Conv1D 10 1×7 2 reLU 10 × 1019
EEG signals collected from both healthy and epileptic subjects 5 Sub-sampling - 2 2 - 10 × 509
[15]. The dataset consists of five subsets (represented as Z, 6 Dropout (0.2) - - - - 10 × 509
O, N, F, and S) that contain one hundred single-channel 7 Conv1D 15 1×5 2 reLU 15 × 505
9 Sub-sampling - 2 2 - 15 × 252
EEG segments each of 23.6 second in duration. The subsets 10 Dropout (0.2) - - - - 15 × 252
Z and O represent the EEG signals recorded using surface 11 Conv1D 20 1×3 2 reLU 20 × 125
EEG electrodes from five healthy volunteers with eyes open 12 Sub-samping - 2 2 - 20 × 62
13 Dropout (0.2) - - - - 20 × 62
and closed, respectively. Moreover, EEG signals in the set 14 Flatten - - - - 1 × 1040
F and N are acquired in seizure free duration from five 16 Dense - - - reLU 64
patients in the epileptogenic zone and hippocampal formation 17 Dropout (0.2) - - - - 64
18 Dense - - - reLU 16
of the opposite hemisphere of the brain respectively. The EEG 19 Dropout (0.2) - - - - 16
subset S represents the seizure activity in the EEG signal. 20 Dense - - - Softmax 2
This dataset was formed by collecting the EEG signals from
sites containing ictal activity and the dataset covers temporal
lobe epilepsy. Moreover, the subsets Z and O contain EEG
III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
signals acquired extracranially whereas the subsets N, F, and
S contain EEG signals acquired intracranially. This dataset is In this section, we evaluate the performance of proposed
created by selecting the EEG signals from a long continuous noise-aware epileptic seizure classification framework using
recordings in order to create the artifact-free (i.e., do not CNN in classifying the epileptic seizures for the noise-free
contain muscular activity and eye movements) dataset and EEG and EEG data with the presence of ocular artifacts.
to avoid biased results for particular subject. Due to this The performance of our proposed analysis is evaluated using
shuffling of the EEG signals collected from different patients, performance measures such as sensitivity (Se), specificity (Sp)
this dataset does not contain any patient wise labelling. All and accuracy (Ac). These performance measures are computed
the EEG signals were acquired using 128 channel amplifier as:
system and average common reference. The EEG signals were TP
Se = , (1)
recorded with a sampling frequency of 173.61 samples/s and TP + FN
12-bit resolution. In addition, the dataset contains EEG signals TN
with a spectral bandwidth between 0.5-85 Hz. In this paper, we Sp = , (2)
also evaluate our proposed CNN architecture using the artifact- TN + FP
free spectral data and ocular artifact-contaminated EEG data. TP + TN
To create the spectral data, the discrete Fourier transform of Ac = (3)
TP + TN + FN + FP
the EEG data from each class is computed.
Where, TP, TN, FP and FN represent true positive, true
B. Proposed CNN Architecture negative, false positive, and false negative, respectively. TP,
TN, FP and FN are the number of correctly detected seizure
The proposed CNN architecture is illustrated in Fig. 1. segments, number of correctly detected non-seizure segments,
Let the input signal to CNN be x(n) of length L, where, number of missed non-seizure segments and number of missed
n = 1, 2, . . . L. The stride length of the CNN is chosen as seizure segments, respectively. We perform our simulation on
2 for each convolution and max-pooling operation. In the first Spyder (Python 3.6) platform running on a computer with Intel
step, raw input EEG data is convolved with the first CNN i7-2600U CPU with a clock speed of 3.40GHz and 8 GB of
layer with five different filters of size 9 × 1, and the output RAM. We evaluate the robustness of CNN in extracting the
of each convolution is known as feature map. The number of discriminative features not only from raw temporal data but
output feature maps is equal to the number of filters in the also from the derived data. These derived data are obtained by
convolutional layer. The stride size is chosen in each layer as taking the Fourier transform of the raw temporal EEG data.
2, to reduce the number of samples by half. In the next step, The CNN model accuracy and loss with respect to number of
each feature map is passed through a non-linear function ‘reLu’ epochs are illustrated in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 respectively. It can
followed by max-pooling or sub-sampling layer. To avoid be observed from the figures that proposed CNN architecture
overfitting, a drop out of 0.2 is considered. Subsequently, this is able to learn the pattern from the data in a few epochs.
process is repeated for remaining layers. Finally, the last layer Since, Bonn’s dataset is comparatively noise-free, different
output is fed to the flatten layer which appends all features types and levels of ocular artifacts are added into the EEG
map to single dimension. The output layer with two neurons data during training and testing stage. Different types of ocular

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 2021 National Conference on Communications (NCC)

1 1
2 2
3 3
4
5 20
1
2
3

Convolutional 1D
Convolutional 1D
4
5

Flatten Layer
Output

Features Map

Feature Map
Sub-Sampling

Sub-Sampling
Input:
1D Raw
EEG signal

CNN Layer 1 Sub-Sampling CNN Layer 4

Layers Sub-Sampling
Features Map Layers
Features Map Fully Connected Layers

Fig. 1: Proposed CNN architecture for epileptic seizure EEG classification.

artifacts are taken from two databases i.e. Mendeley database

and Polysmnographic database [18], [19]. We evaluate the
performance of the proposed method in classifying seizure and
non-seizure EEG signals into following combination of class
types: S-Z (seizure signals subset (S) and non-seizure signals
subset (Z)), S-O (seizure signals subset (S) and non-seizure
signals subset (O)), S-N (seizure signals subset (S) and non-
seizure signals subset (N)), S-F (seizure signals subset (S) and
non-seizure signals subset (F)). We also evaluate the proposed
method on the mixed subset of S, N, and O, which is denoted
as S-N-O.

TABLE II: Seizure Classification Performance for Temporal

EEG Data Fig. 2: Illustrates proposed CNN model accuracy versus
epochs.
Method Class Type Sp Se Ac Loss
(%) (%) (%)
S-N 100 100 100 0.01
Performances evaluation for S-O 100 90 95 0.39
OA-free EEGs S-Z 100 100 100 0.0
S-F 100 95 97.5 0.31
S-N-O - - 96.67 0.15
S-N 100 60 80 2.91
Performances evaluation for S-O 100 80 90 1.24
EEGs with OA in S-Z 100 80 90 1.23
testing phase S-F 100 66.7 83.3 2.04
S-N-O - - 85.56 0.72
S-N 100 65 82.5 2.59
Performances evaluation for S-O 100 55 77.5 3.91
EEGs with OA in both S-Z 100 52.5 76.25 3.77
testing and training phases S-F 100 67.5 83.75 2.36

1) Performance Evaluation Under OA-Free EEG Data: As

mentioned earlier, Bonn’s dataset contains artifact-free EEG
signals, we consider 80% of the data for the training, out
of which 30% data is used for the validation. Remaining Fig. 3: Illustrates proposed CNN model loss versus epochs.
20% of the data is used for testing. Simulation results are
depicted in Table II and III for the raw temporal EEG data
and spectral EEG data, respectively. Furthermore, it can be
observed from the tables that proposed CNN architecture is
able to derive more reliable features from the spectral EEG data as compared to temporal EEG data with low loss. Since

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 2021 National Conference on Communications (NCC)

exiting seizure classification methods are evaluated on EOG Overall, it is observed from the results that the performance
artifact-free EEG data, we also evaluate and compare the of CNN in classifying seizure activity is severely degraded
performance of proposed method with existing method based under the presence of OAs which was not analysed in the
on deep convolution neural network [16] on the same data. existing works. Therefore, it is important to train the CNNs
It can be observed from the classification results that our after preprocessing the EEG data or using maximum possible
proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 96.67% models of OAs corrupted EEGs to improve the performance of
while existing seizure classification method propsed in [16] CNN-based seizure classification methods. Also, the use of de-
achieves an average accuracy of 88.27% for the same set S-N- rived EEG can improve the seizure classification performance.
O. This demonstrates its superior performance over the existing
method. Moreover, in this paper, we considered individual IV. C ONCLUSION
class set with the seizure signal which has not been done in In this paper, the impact of ocular artifacts on the perfor-
the earlier works. mance of CNN is analyzed in extracting the reliable features
from the EEG data for seizure classification. Also, we evaluate
TABLE III: Seizure Classification Performance in Spectral the performance of proposed CNN architecture in determining
Domain the accurate and reliable features from both raw EEG data and
spectral domain EEG data. The performance of the method is
Method Class Type Sp Se Ac Loss
(%) (%) (%) evaluated on the EEG signals taken from the Bonn’s dataset
S-N 100 95 97.5 0.08 with different types and levels of ocular artifacts. The per-
Performances evaluation for S-O 100 100 100 0.01 formance evaluation results demonstrate that the classification
OA-free EEGs S-Z 100 100 100 0.0
S-F 95 100 97.5 0.01 accuracy of the method is degraded significantly under the
S-N-O - - 96.67 0.18 presence of ocular artifacts. Furthermore, it is observed that the
S-N 100 60 80 2.91
Performances evaluation for S-O 100 80 90 1.24
proposed CNN architecture is able to extract the discriminatory
EEGs with OA in S-Z 100 80 90 1.23 features from spectral EEG data more accurately as compared
testing phase S-F 100 66.7 83.3 2.04 to the raw temporal EEG data.
S-N-O - - 85.56 0.72
S-N 97.5 60 78.25 3.19
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