Background: Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are important for brain health monitoring applications. Characteristics of EEG signals are complex, being non-stationarity, aperiodic and nonlinear in nature. EEG signals are a combination of sustained oscillation and non-oscillation transients that are challenging to deal with using linear approaches.

Method: This research proposes a new scheme based on a tunable Q-factor wavelet transform (TQWT) and a statistical approach to analyse various EEG recordings. Firstly, the proposed method decompose EEG signals into different sub-bands using the TQWT method, which is parameterized by its Q-factor and redundancy. This method depends on the resonance of a signal, instead of frequency or scaling as in the Fourier and wavelet transforms. Secondly, using a statistical feature extraction on the sub-bands to divide each sub-band into n windows, and then extract several statistical features from each window. Finally, the extracted features are forwarded to a bagging tree (BT), k nearest neighbor (k-NN), and support vector machine (SVM) as classifiers to evaluate the performance of the proposed feature extraction technique.

Results: The proposed method is tested on two different EEG databases: Bonn University database and Born University database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed feature extraction algorithm with thek-NN classifier produces the best performance compared with the other two classifiers.

Comparison with existing methods: In order to further evaluate the performances, the proposed scheme is compared with the other existing methods in terms of accuracy. The results prove that the proposed TQWT based feature extraction method has great potential to extract discriminative information from brain signals.

Conclusion: The outcomes of the proposed technique can assist doctors and other health experts to identify diversified EEG categories.