eess.SPApr 27, 2026

BandRouteNet: An Adaptive Band Routing Neural Network for EEG Artifact Removal

Authors: Phat Lam

Organizations: Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) is highly susceptible to artifact contamination, such as electrooculographic (EOG) and electromyographic (EMG) interference, which severely degrades signal quality and hinders reliable interpretation in applications including neurological diagnosis, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), etc. Effective EEG denoising remains challenging because different artifact sources exhibit diverse and temporally varying distributions, together with distinct spectral characteristics across frequency bands. To address these issues, we propose BandRouteNet, an adaptive frequency-aware neural network for EEG denoising that jointly exploits band-specific processing and full-band contextual modeling. The proposed model performs band-wise denoising to explicitly capture frequency-dependent artifact patterns. Within this framework, we introduce a routing mechanism that adaptively determines where and to what extent denoising should be applied across temporal locations within each frequency band. In parallel, a full-band conditioner directly processes the original noisy EEG to extract global temporal context, producing both conditional parameters for modulating the band-wise pathway and a coarse-grained signal-level refinement to supplement the final reconstruction. Extensive experiments on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark dataset demonstrate that BandRouteNet outperforms other methods under EOG, EMG, and mixed-artifact conditions in terms of Relative Root Mean Square Error (RRMSE) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio Improvement (SNRimp_{\text{imp}}) under unified experimental settings, while remaining highly parameter-efficient with only 0.2M trainable parameters. These results highlight its strong potential for high-performance EEG artifact removal in resource-constrained applications.

Explore similar work

May 14, 2026eess.SP

nASR: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Layer for Channel-Level EEG Artifact Subspace Reconstruction in Real-Time BCI

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are highly susceptible to artifacts, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio which makes extraction of meaningful neural information challenging. Artifact Subspace Reconstruction (ASR) is one of the most widely used artifact filtering techniques in EEG-based BCI applications, owing to its real-time applicability. ASR reconstructs artifact-free signals by operating in Principal Component (PC) space within sliding windows. However, ASR performance is critically sensitive to its threshold parameter - an incorrect threshold risks removing task-relevant neural features alongside artifacts. Furthermore, since PCs are linear combinations of all channels, subspace reconstruction in PC space may alter the underlying data structure, potentially discarding essential neural information. To address these limitations, we propose nASR, a novel end-to-end trainable Keras layer that jointly optimizes artifact rejection and downstream decoding. nASR introduces two trainable threshold parameters: K, which governs artifact detection in PC variance space, and L, which quantifies eigen-spread to pinpoint the primary artifact--contributing channels, enabling selective channel-level reconstruction that preserves clean channel information. An ablation study comprising five model variants (m01 - m05), evaluated across two subjects from the BCI Competition IV Dataset 1, confirms that nASR variants consistently outperform traditional ASR on test classification metrics, while achieving a 6-8x reduction in inference time, making nASR a strong candidate for real-time BCI applications demanding both low latency and high decoding performance.
Shantanu Sarkar, Jose L. Contreras-Vidal
May 24, 2026cs.LG

BandVQ: Band-Wise Vector-Quantized EEG Foundation Model

A central challenge in electroencephalography (EEG) foundation modeling is learning transferable representations across recordings with diverse tasks, montages, references, and spectral characteristics. Existing masked modeling approaches often rely on broadband continuous patches or a single discrete representation, which may underrepresent frequency-specific activity. This paper proposes BandVQ, a band-wise vector-quantized EEG foundation model that decomposes EEG into delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands, trains an independent VQ-VAE tokenizer for each band, and pretrains a shared Transformer encoder on the resulting discrete VQ code indices. The encoder uses masked code tokens, quantized absolute log-power tokens, channel and temporal embeddings, and metadata prefix tokens representing reference, band, task family, and phase. Region-based masking is also introduced to reduce the trivial reconstruction of spatially adjacent electrodes. The model is pretrained on 71 public EEG corpora comprising over 9,200 subjects and 357,000 single-channel hours and evaluated on six subject-independent classification datasets. Under the current evaluation setting, the proposed model achieves strong transfer performance, with the highest reported results on three cognitive tasks and competitive performance on three motor imagery tasks.
Jamiyan Sukhbaatar, Satoshi Imamura, Toshihisa Tanaka
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Enabling Unsupervised Training of Deep EEG Denoisers With Intelligent Partitioning

Denoising wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) is inherently challenging since neural activity is not only subtle but also inseparable from spectrally overlapping noise artifacts. Classical signal processing methods, relying on fixed or heuristic rules, cannot handle the time-varying pervasive artifacts in wearable EEGs. Deep learning methods, on the other hand, show promise in decomposition-free EEG denoising using highly expressive neural networks, but the training requires artifact-free EEG, which is inherently unobtainable. To address this, we propose Intelligent Partitioning for Self-supervised Denoising (iPSD). Our method eliminates the need for clean references by learning to partition an input EEG segment into independent noisy realizations with the same underlying signal. This enables self-supervision of deep learning denoisers, even in zero-shot settings where only a single EEG segment to be denoised is available. We validate iPSD through extensive experiments, including validations on wearable EEG from in-ear sensors. The results show that iPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance, most notably under extremely low signal-to-noise ratios (down to -10 dB) and challenging artifacts (e.g., EMG), with spectral fidelity orders of magnitude higher than competitive baselines.
Qiyu Rao, Haozhe Tian, Homayoun Hamedmoghadam +1