Minimum energy combination (MEC) and canonical correlation analysis (CCA) are widely used for steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain computer interface (BCI), since both approaches have satisfactory performance. The purpose of this paper is to provide a guideline on choice of detection method, through comparison of the performance of the two approaches from simulation data and real SSVEP data. The experiment results show that CCA has lower deviation, higher accuracy and higher signal to noise ratio than MEC. © 2011 IEEE.