Breaking the Depth Barrier in Motor Imagery Classification via a Residual Depthwise-Separable Network

Lightweight networks that include depthwise-separable convolution are widely used in motor imagery (MI) electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding of brain–computer interface (BCI). Many established MI classification networks are relatively shallow, preventing them from benefiting from the hierarchical feature extraction capabilities of deeper structures. Due to suboptimal residual connection structures, the mismatched residual baseline layer design, and the poor compatibility between data preprocessing and residual modules, the deepening of networks cannot be effectively combined with residual structures. This creates a depth barrier that hinders further performance improvements. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method, residual depthwise-separable deep neural network (ResDSNet), built upon an unraveled view-path analysis of residual connection structures. The analysis reveals that the residual mechanism achieves optimal performance when the layer distribution across different paths approximates a binomial distribution. Furthermore, we design a residual depthwise-separable convolution module and a tailored data-preprocessing module that effectively integrate with the residual structure, filtering noise and retaining MI task features. We evaluate ResDSNet on three publicly available datasets, including the BCI Competition IV Dataset IIa, the BCI Competition IV Dataset IIb, and the PhysioNet dataset, which collectively contain EEG signals recorded from 127 human subjects. ResDSNet achieves accuracies of 79.36%, 84.95%, and 64.13%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 3.16%, 1.59%, and 8.40% with statistical significance. Experimental results indicate that ResDSNet fully unlocks the hierarchical representation capabilities of deep networks for MI-EEG decoding, achieving robust performance and demonstrating substantial potential to overcome the inherent challenges in BCIs.