Real-Time EEG Cap Electrode Detection for Guided Point-of-Care Placement

Abstract

We present a two-stage vision system that detects EEG cap electrodes in a live webcam stream and validates their anatomical placement in real time. A single-class YOLO detector localises electrodes; a geometric stage assigns each detection to a named 10-20 role from facial landmarks. Evaluating under subject-disjoint leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation across five subjects wearing the clinically-validated Small/Medium/Large caps, the detector attains mAP@.5 = 0.94 +/- 0.07 across five held-out folds (0.96 pooled). A dedicated leave-one-cap-out axis, holding out every frame of a cap regardless of subject, leaves Medium and Large mAP@.5 within 0.01 of LOSO (0.97, 0.97) while Small drops to 0.72 +/- 0.28, a gap confounded with subject familiarity rather than cap style. Geometric augmentation (rotation, perspective, mixup) improves in-plane-roll robustness and temporal-electrode recall at no inference cost, and a landmark-driven head crop extends the usable distance range, lifting mAP@.5 from 0.23 to 0.45 at 0.6 x apparent scale. A compact mobile-candidate backbone (YOLOv10n) keeps the detector at real-time throughput (19 FPS) on a commodity CPU at 640 px.