VG-DOCoT: a novel DO-Conv and transformer framework via VAE-GAN technique for EEG emotion recognition

Human emotions are intricate psychological phenomena that reflect an individual’s current physiological and psychological state. Emotions have a pronounced influence on human behavior, cognition, communication, and decision-making. However, current emotion recognition methods often suffer from suboptimal performance and limited scalability in practical applications. To solve this problem, a novel electroencephalogram (EEG) emotion recognition network named VG-DOCoT is proposed, which is based on depthwise over-parameterized convolutional (DO-Conv), transformer, and variational automatic encoder-generative adversarial network (VAE-GAN) structures. Specifically, the differential entropy (DE) can be extracted from EEG signals to create mappings into the temporal, spatial, and frequency information in preprocessing. To enhance the training data, VAE-GAN is employed for data augmentation. A novel convolution module DO-Conv is used to replace the traditional convolution layer to improve the network. A transformer structure is introduced into the network framework to reveal the global dependencies from EEG signals. Using the proposed model, a binary classification on the DEAP dataset is carried out, which achieves an accuracy of 92.52% for arousal and 92.27% for valence. Next, a ternary classification is conducted on SEED, which classifies neutral, positive, and negative emotions; an impressive average prediction accuracy of 93.77% is obtained. The proposed method significantly improves the accuracy for EEG-based emotion recognition.