Beyond Mimicking Under-Represented Emotions: Deep Data Augmentation with Emotional Subspace Constraints for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

In recent years, using Electroencephalography (EEG) to recognize emotions has garnered considerable attention. Despite advancements, limited EEG data restricts its potential. Thus, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are proposed to mimic the observed distributions and generate EEG data. However, for imbalanced datasets, GANs struggle to produce reliable augmentations for under-represented minority emotions by merely mimicking them. Thus, we introduce Emotional Subspace Constrained Generative Adversarial Networks (ESC-GAN) as an alternative to existing frameworks. We first propose the EEG editing paradigm, editing reference EEG signals from well-represented to under-represented emotional subspaces. Then, we introduce diversity-aware and boundary-aware losses to constrain the augmented subspace. Here, the diversity-aware loss encourages a diverse emotional subspace by enlarging the sample difference, while boundary-aware loss constrains the augmented subspace near the decision boundary where recognition models can be vulnerable. Experiments show ESC-GAN boosts emotion recognition performance on benchmark datasets, DEAP, AMIGOS, and SEED, while protecting against potential adversarial attacks. Finally, the proposed method opens new avenues for editing EEG signals under emotional subspace constraints, facilitating unbiased and secure EEG data augmentation.