Advancing cross-subject olfactory EEG recognition: A novel framework for collaborative multimodal learning between human-machine

Odor sensory evaluation is broadly applied in food, clothing, cosmetics, and other fields. Traditional artificial sensory evaluation has poor repeatability, and the machine olfaction represented by the electronic nose (E-nose) is difficult to reflect human feelings. Olfactory electroencephalogram (EEG) contains features associated with human olfactory preference, which has unique advantages in odor sensory evaluation. However, the difficulty of cross-subject olfactory EEG recognition dramatically limits its application. In this paper, a human–machine collaborative multimodal learning method is proposed for cross-subject olfactory preference recognition. Firstly, the olfactory EEG and E-nose multimodal data acquisition and preprocessing paradigms are established. Secondly, a complementary multimodal data mining strategy is proposed to effectively mine the individual and common features representing subjects' olfactory preferences from multimodal data. Finally, the cross-subject olfactory preference recognition is achieved in 24 subjects by fusing the extracted common and individual features, and the recognition effect is superior to the state-of-the-art recognition methods. Furthermore, the advantages of the proposed method in cross-subject olfactory preference recognition indicate its potential for practical odor evaluation applications.