Recognition of Subtle Gestures by 2-Channel sEMG Using Parameter Estimation Classifiers Based on Probability Density

Abstract

The abundant movement information carried by the surface electromyography (sEMG) signal can comprehensively reflect the muscle movement patterns on the surface of the human body, and the characteristics of physiological signals involving movement information have promoted the vigorous development in the field of human-computer interaction in machine learning. This paper takes subtle gestures as the research objects, and proposes a subtle gestures recognition system that uses two-channel sEMG signal and utilizes Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) which are parameter estimation classifiers based on probability density. First, combining the raw sEMG signal and the envelope sEMG signal, the number of channels for sensors and corresponding position of the muscle groups are preferably selected. Then, we propose to use the Pearson correlation coefficient to optimize the four types of features extracted in the time domain, frequency domain, time-frequency domain and AR model parameters, which effectively ensures the uniqueness of each gesture and eliminates individual differences. Finally, this paper compares four classifiers of QDA, LDA, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and explores the pattern recognition classifier suitable for subtle actions. The experiment collects 9 kinds of subtle gestures from 8 subjects. The results show that the system can use only two channels of sEMG signal to recognize 9 kinds of subtle gestures which include multi-finger clicking or pinching or holding objects, and the most suitable classifiers QDA and LDA have the average recognition rates of 95.79% and 95.01%, respectively.

Keywords

• Gesture recognition
• Pearson correlation coefficient
• parameter estimation classifiers based on probability density
• surface electromyography signal