GLCM Texture Classification for
EEG Spectrogram Image
Mahfuzah Mustafa
1,2
, Mohd Nasir Taib
2,3
, Zunairah Hj. Murat
2,3
, Noor Hayatee Abdul Hamid
2,3
1
Faculty of Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Pahang, Pahang, Malaysia
mahfuzah@ump.edu.my
2
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia
3
Biomedical Research Laboratory for Human Potential, Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia, Shah Alam, Malaysia
dr.nasir@ieee.org
zunairahh@yahoo.com
Abstract— Over the past century, time based and frequency
based is used for analyzing Electroencephalography (EEG)
signals. EEG is a scientific tool for measure signal from human
brain. This paper proposes a time-frequency approach or
spectrogram image processing technique for analyzing EEG
signals. Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) texture
feature were extracted from spectrogram image and then
Principal components analysis (PCA) was employed to reduce
the feature dimension. The purpose of this paper is to classify
EEG spectrogram image using k-nearest neighbor algorithm
(kNN) classifier. The result shows classification rate was 70.83%
for EEG spectrogram image.
Keywords— EEG, spectrogram image, GLCM, texture feature,
PCA, kNN
I. INTRODUCTION
The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It
performs various tasks such as control heart rate, hearing,
speech and etc. The brain is made of billions cells called
neurons. Neurons send a signal to control the movement of the
whole human body. The signal or wave can be measured
using EEG. However, this signal should be extracted to obtain
information that can be used in research.
EEG signal is analyzed by various methods, for example
in time based, frequency based and time-frequency based.
Usually, EEG raw signals are in time-based format. To
analyze in frequency-based, usually the signals need to be
transformed into Fourier Transform (FT). In this paper, EEG
signals were analyzed based on time-frequency image
processing technique or called spectrogram. The most often
technique used to analyze signal in time-frequency based is
Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT). The STFT is to
perform a FT on the signal, then mapping the signal into a
two-dimensional function of frequency and time.
Many studies have been done on time-frequency based but
mainly in signal processing area [1] but very few in image
processing area. However, there is example of research using
the spectrogram in time-frequency to classify heart
abnormalities from electrocardiogram (ECG) [2]. The
spectrogram was produced using STFT technique. They
extracted the Euler number and height and width of pulses
from the spectrogram image. For the purpose of classification,
Back-propagation ANN was used and gives 100% accuracy in
heart abnormalities.
Once an image is obtained, various image processing
tools, such as texture analysis, could be used. Most popular
technique for the textural classification is GLCM. This
technique commonly used to process texture of image various
application such as satellite, wood and ultrasound. The GLCM
is a tabulation of grey levels frequency occurring in an image.
There is example of study use the GLCM in ECG [3]. The
study is to detect sleep disorder breathing in human heart.
They are using Fuzzy with result 79.29% accuracy in training
and 75.88% accuracy in testing. The signal or wave can be
measured using EEG.
After GLCM process is done, texture features need to be
extracted. The most popular texture feature extraction is
proposed by Haralick [4] and Soh [5]. Haralick proposed 14
texture features to apply to the photomicrographs of
sandstones, photographs of land-use and satellite photographs
of land-use while Soh propose 10 texture features for satellite
photographs of sea ice.
It has been shown elsewhere, the PCA was used for data
reduction and classification purposes. In [6], they choose the
first three principal components which are contrast,
dissimilarity and homogeneity, out of eight GLCM texture
features. As a result, the first three components from PCA
give better accuracy in classification than all eight GLCM
texture features. In this paper, a study of dimension reduction
of GLCM texture features is presented. The feature is
extracted from EEG spectrogram image.
The kNN is amongst the simplest classifier of machine
learning algorithm. In kNN, an object is classified by a
majority vote of its neighbors based on space. There are
various types of space used, for example Euclidean, City
block and Cosine but researchers often use the Euclidean
distance.
There are studies using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix
(GLCM) texture feature to be fed to a kNN classifier [7, 8], in
order to classify the images in various application.
2010 IEEE EMBS Conference on Biomedical Engineering & Sciences (IECBES 2010), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 30th November - 2nd December 2010.
978-1-4244-7600-8/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE 373