ID-RemovalNet: Identity Removal Network for EEG Privacy Protection with Enhancing Decoding Tasks

Abstract

Electroencephalogram (EEG) contains not only decoding task information but also personal identity privacy information. If it is stolen or attacked, the user's brain-computer interaction behavior may be maliciously manipulated. Existing EEG identity privacy protection generally adopts generative or adding tiny perturbation methods, which can protect the identity privacy in EEG signals to some extent. However, these methods also damage the performance of decoding task. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an identity removal network (ID-RemovalNet) to achieve EEG privacy protection while improving the classification accuracy of decoding task. Firstly, an identity decorrelation separation module is constructed to accurately remove the identity features to achieve privacy protection while reducing the interference with the task decoding features. Secondly, a multi-domain multi-level fusion feature extraction module is designed to extract the high-quality EEG time-frequency features. Finally, the feature enhancement module is used to compensate for the loss of task decoding features and excitation of dominant feature selection during identity feature removal. The experimental results show that ID-RemoveNet removes identity information to 0.43% on four EEG datasets with two different paradigms, and significantly improves the EEG task decoding accuracy by 3.28%, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in cross-subject EEG experiment.