Electromyography Signal-Based Gesture Recognition for Human-Machine Interaction in Real-Time Through Model Calibration

In this work, we achieve up to 92% classification accuracy of electromyographic data between five gestures in pseudo-real-time. Most current state-of-the-art methods in electromyographical signal processing are unable to classify real-time data in a post-learning environment, that is, after the model is trained and results are analysed. In this work we show that a process of model calibration is able to lead models from 67.87% real-time classification accuracy to 91.93%, an increase of 24.06%. We also show that an ensemble of classical machine learning models can outperform a Deep Neural Network. An original dataset of EMG data is collected from 15 subjects for 4 gestures (Open-Fingers, Wave-Out, Wave-in, Close-fist) using a Myo Armband for measurement of forearm muscle activity. The dataset is cleaned between gesture performances on a per-subject basis and a sliding temporal window algorithm is used to perform statistical analysis of EMG signals and extract meaningful mathematical features as input to the learning paradigms. The classifiers used in this paper include a Random Forest, a Support Vector Machine, a Multilayer Perceptron, and a Deep Neural Network. The three classical classifiers are combined into a single model through an ensemble voting system which scores 91.93% compared to the Deep Neural Network which achieves a performance of 88.68%, both after calibrating to a subject and performing real-time classification (pre-calibration scores for the two being 67.87% and 74.27%, respectively).