MASER: Enhancing EEG Spatial Resolution with State Space Modeling

Consumer-grade Electroencephalography (EEG) devices equipped with few electrodes often suffer from low spatial resolution, hindering the accurate capture of intricate brain activity patterns. To address this issue, we propose MASER, a novel super-resolution approach for EEG recording. In MASER, we design the eMamba block for extracting EEG features based on the principles of state space models (SSMs). We further stack eMamba blocks to form a low-resolution feature extractor and a high-resolution signal predictor, which enhances the feature representation. During the training of MASER, we fully consider the characteristics of multidimensional biological series signals, incorporating a smoothness constraint loss to achieve more consistent high-resolution reconstructions. MASER pioneers EEG-oriented state space modeling, effectively capturing the temporal dynamics and latent states, thereby revealing complex neural interactions over time. Extensive experiments show that the proposed MASER outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in super-resolution quality on two public EEG datasets, with normalized mean square error reduced by 16.25% and Pearson correlation improved by 1.13%. Moreover, a case study of motor imagery recognition highlights the advantages conferred by high-resolution EEG signals. With a 4x increase in spatial resolution by MASER, the recognition accuracy improves by 5.74%, implying a significant performance elevation in brain-computer interface (BCI) command mapping. By enhancing the spatial resolution of EEG signals, MASER makes EEG-based applications more accessible, reducing cost and setup time while maintaining high performance across various domains such as gaming, education, and healthcare.