Odor pleasantness classification from electroencephalographic signals and emotional states

Abstract

Odor identification refers to the capability of the olfactory sense for discerning odors. The interest in this sense has grown over multiple fields and applications such as multimedia, virtual reality, marketing, among others. Therefore, objective identification of pleasant and unpleasant odors is an open research field. Some studies have been carried out based on electroencephalographic signals (EEG). Nevertheless, these can be considered insufficient due to the levels of accuracy achieved so far. The main objective of this study was to investigate the capability of the classifiers systems for identification pleasant and unpleasant odors from EEG signals. The methodology applied was carried out in three stages. First, an odor database was collected using the signals recorded with an Emotiv Epoc+ with 14 channels of electroencephalography (EEG) and using a survey for establishing the emotion levels based on valence and arousal considering that the odor induces emotions. The registers were acquired from three subjects, each was subjected to 10 different odor stimuli two times. The second stage was the feature extraction which was carried out on 5 sub-bands δ, θ, α, β, γ of EEG signals using discrete wavelet transform, statistical measures, and other measures such as area, energy, and entropy. Then, feature selection was applied based on Rough Set algorithms. Finally, in the third stage was applied a Support vector machine (SVM) classifier, which was tested with five different kernels. The performance of classifiers was compared using k-fold cross-validation. The best result of 99.9% was achieved using the linear kernel. The more relevant features were obtained from sub-bands β and α. Finally, relations among emotion, EEG, and odors were demonstrated.