Kurtosis, Renyi’s Entropy and Independent Component Scalp Maps for the Automatic Artifact Rejection from EEG data

The goal of this work is to improve the efficiency and the reliability of the automatic artifact rejection, in particular from the Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. Artifact rejection is a key topic in signal processing. The artifacts are unwelcome signals that may occur during the signal acquisition and that may alter the analysis of the signals themselves. A technique for the automatic artifact rejection, based on the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for the artifact extraction and on some high order statistics such as kurtosis and Shannon’s entropy, was proposed some years ago in literature. In this paper we enhance this technique introducing the Renyi’s entropy. The performance of our method was tested exploiting the Independent Component scalp maps and it was compared to the performance of the method in literature and it showed to outperform it. Keywords—Artifact, EEG, Renyi’s entropy, Independent Component Analysis, kurtosis.