Toward Generalization of sEMG-Based Pattern Recognition: A Novel Feature Extraction for Gesture Recognition

Gesture recognition via surface electromyography (sEMG) has drawn significant attention in the field of human-computer interaction. An important factor limiting the performance of sEMG-based pattern recognition (PR) is the generalization ability which sEMG changes for the identical movements when conducted at various positions or by different persons. Thus, this study aims to explore the generalization of classifier to develop a stable classification model that does not require relearning, even if it is used by other people. We propose a new feature extraction method to diminish the influence of limb position on sEMG-based PR. Specifically, the sEMG features are extracted directly from time domain. This condition is accomplished by using Fourier transform properties, difference, and the sum of squares differences. The best offline cross-validation accuracy (CVA) results are 88.775% training data from the tenth subject and testing data from the fifth subject in the NinaPro dataset. The best online CVA is 99%, and the movement selection time is 47.036 +/- 1.028 ms. In comparison with the well-known sEMG feature, the CVA and the generalization of the proposed features improved substantially. These improvements aim to facilitate the practical implementation of myoelectric interfaces.