AbstractIn recent years, there has been a renewal of interest in brain–computer interface (BCI). One of the BCI tasks is to classify the EEG motor imagery (MI). A great deal of effort has been made on MI classification. What seems to be lacking, however, is multiple MI classification. This paper develops a single-channel-based convolutional neural network to tackle multi-classification motor imagery tasks. For multi-classification, a single-channel learning strategy can extract effective information from each independent channel, making the information between adjacent channels not affect each other. A data evaluation method and a mutual information-based regularization parameters auto-selection algorithm are also proposed to generate effective spatial filters. The proposed method can be used to tackle the problem of an inaccurate mixed covariance matrix caused by fixed regularization parameters and invalid training data. To illustrate the merits of the proposed methods, we used the tenfold cross-validation accuracy and kappa as the evaluation measures to test two data sets. BCI4-2a and BCI3a data sets have four mental classes. For the BCI4-2a data set, the average accuracy is 79.01%, and the kappa is 0.7202 using data evaluation-based auto-selected filter bank regularized common spatial pattern voting (D-ACSP-V) and single-channel series convolutional neural network (SCS-CNN). Compared to traditional FBRCSP, the proposed method improved accuracy by 7.14% for the BCI4-2a data set. By using the BCI3a data set, the proposed method improved accuracy by 9.54% compared with traditional FBRCSP, the average accuracy of the proposed method is 83.70%, and the kappa is 0.7827.