User Reference:Filters
Filters are the most important building blocks of a BCI2000 system. This document describes the filter concept for users going to configure BCI2000 for their own experiments, and provides links to the individual filters' documentation pages describing each filter's purpose and parameterization.
Data Processing as a Pipe
Each of the three BCI2000 core modules contains a chain of filters, i.e. a sequence of filters forming a pipe where, basically, brain signal data enter on one side, and a processed version of these data leaves on the other side.
The notion of a pipe implies that, for each portion of data entering on the input side, there will be exactly one portion of output data on the output side. This is analogous to a water pipe: unlike a water stream (a brook, or a river), it is impossible to insert or remove water from inside the pipe without breaking it. Similarly, albeit signal portions may change their shape on their way through the pipe (filter chain), it is impossible to insert or remove any of them. Thus, each data portion acquired by the data acquisition module will run through the entire BCI2000 system, being processed by a sequence of filters.
Configuration Overview
In principle, these filters may be placed in any order by the writer (programmer) of a BCI2000 module, and it is technically easy to change the number, and order, of filters. However, not all combinations or orderings of filters make sense.
The table shows modules and filters for BCI2000 configurations included in the core distribution:
| Data Acquisition | Signal Processing | Application | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
AlignmentFilter | SpatialFilter | ARFilter | Classifier | Normalizer | ConnectorInput | CursorTask | ConnectorOutput | ||||
| P3TemporalFilter | P3AV, P3Speller | |||||||||||
Data Acquisition Module
In the data acquisition (source) module, the DataIOFilter manages data acquisition and storage in a general manner. Actual acquisition of data is provided by ADC filters, actual writing into data files is done by FileWriter filters representing various Data Formats. Filter documentation for source modules is available for