We present an improvement to the quaternion-based signal analysis (QSA) technique to extract electroencephalography (EEG) signal features with a view to developing real-time applications, particularly in motor imagery (IM) cognitive processes. The proposed methodology (iQSA, improved QSA) extracts features such as the average, variance, homogeneity, and contrast of EEG signals related to motor imagery in a more efficient manner (i.e., by reducing the number of samples needed to classify the signal and improving the classification percentage) compared to the original QSA technique. Specifically, we can sample the signal in variable time periods (from 0.5 s to 3 s, in half-a-second intervals) to determine the relationship between the number of samples and their effectiveness in classifying signals. In addition, to strengthen the classification process a number of boosting-technique-based decision trees were implemented. The results show an 82.30% accuracy rate for 0.5 s samples and 73.16% for 3 s samples. This is a significant improvement compared to the original QSA technique that offered results from 33.31% to 40.82% without sampling window and from 33.44% to 41.07% with sampling window, respectively. We can thus conclude that iQSA is better suited to develop real-time applications.
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