Recent advancements in diagnostic learning and development of gesture-based human machine interfaces have driven surface electromyography (sEMG) towards significant importance. Analysis of hand gestures requires an accurate assessment of sEMG signals. The proposed work presents a novel sequential master-slave architecture consisting of deep neural networks (DNNs) for classification of signs from the Indian sign language using signals recorded from multiple sEMG channels. The performance of the master-slave network is augmented by leveraging additional synthetic feature data generated by long short term memory networks. Performance of the proposed network is compared to that of a conventional DNN prior to and after the addition of synthetic data. Up to 14% improvement is observed in the conventional DNN and up to 9% improvement in master-slave network on addition of synthetic data with an average accuracy value of 93.5% asserting the suitability of the proposed approach.
Surface Electromyography (sEMG/EMG) is to record muscles' electrical activity from a restricted area of the skin by using electrodes. The sEMG-based gesture recognition is extremely sensitive of inter-session and inter-subject variances. We propose a model and a deep-learning-based domain adaptation method to approximate the domain shift for recognition accuracy enhancement. Analysis performed on sparse and HighDensity (HD) sEMG public datasets validate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
We propose a new metric to measure domain divergence and a new domain adaptation method for time-series classification. The metric belongs to the class of probability distributions-based metrics, is transductive, and does not assume the presence of source data samples. The 2-stage method utilizes an improved autoregressive, RNN-based architecture with deep/non-linear transformation. We assess our metric and the performance of our model in the context of sEMG/EMG-based gesture recognition under inter-session and inter-subject domain shifts.
JetBrains Research（JetBrains研究院）；University of York（约克大学）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国家研究型高等经济学院）
Movement control of artificial limbs has made big advances in recent years. New sensor and control technology enhanced the functionality and usefulness of artificial limbs to the point that complex movements, such as grasping, can be performed to a limited extent. To date, the most successful results were achieved by applying recurrent neural networks (RNNs). However, in the domain of artificial hands, experiments so far were limited to non-mobile wrists, which significantly reduces the functionality of such prostheses. In this paper, for the first time, we present empirical results on gesture…
A Deep Learning Sequential Decoder for Transient High-Density Electromyography in Hand Gesture Recognition Using Subject-Embedded Transfer Learning
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)（加州大学洛杉矶分校（UCLA））；New York University (NYU)（纽约大学（NYU））；NYU WIRELESS（纽约大学无线研究中心）；NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP)（纽约大学城市科学与进步中心（CUSP））
In this paper, we present our work on developing robot arm prosthetic via deep learning. Our work proposes to use transfer learning techniques applied to the Google Inception model to retrain the final layer for surface electromyography (sEMG) classification. Data have been collected using the Thalmic Labs Myo Armband and used to generate graph images comprised of 8 subplots per image containing sEMG data captured from 40 data points per sensor, corresponding to the array of 8 sEMG sensors in the armband. Data captured were then classified into four categories (Fist, Thumbs Up, Open Hand, Rest…
Myoelectric control is one of the leading areas of research in the field of robotic prosthetics. We present our research in surface electromyography (sEMG) signal classification, where our simple and novel attention-based approach now leads the industry, universally beating more complex, state-of-the-art models. Our novel attention-based model achieves benchmark leading results on multiple industry-standard datasets including 53 finger, wrist, and grasping motions, improving over both sophisticated signal processing and CNN-based approaches. Our strong results with a straightforward model also…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；New York University（纽约大学）；York University（约克大学）
This work is motivated by the recent advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and their widespread applications in human-machine interfaces. DNNs have been recently used for detecting the intended hand gesture through processing of surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals. The ultimate goal of these approaches is to realize high-performance controllers for prosthetic. However, although DNNs have shown superior accuracy than conventional methods when large amounts of data are available for training, their performance substantially decreases when data are limited. Collecting large datasets for train…
Accurate and real-time hand gesture recognition is essential for controlling advanced hand prostheses. Surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals obtained from the forearm are widely used for this purpose. Here, we introduce a novel hand gesture representation called Temporal Muscle Activation (TMA) maps which captures information about the activation patterns of muscles in the forearm. Based on these maps, we propose an algorithm that can recognize hand gestures in real-time using a Convolution Neural Network. The algorithm was tested on 8 healthy subjects with sEMG signals acquired from 8 elect…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）
Designing efficient and labor-saving prosthetic hands requires powerful hand gesture recognition algorithms that can achieve high accuracy with limited complexity and latency. In this context, the paper proposes a compact deep learning framework referred to as the CT-HGR, which employs a vision transformer network to conduct hand gesture recognition using highdensity sEMG (HD-sEMG) signals. The attention mechanism in the proposed model identifies similarities among different data segments with a greater capacity for parallel computations and addresses the memory limitation problems while deali…
Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Human-machine interaction is gaining traction in rehabilitation tasks, such as controlling prosthetic hands or robotic arms. Gesture recognition exploiting surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals is one of the most promising approaches, given that sEMG signal acquisition is non-invasive and is directly related to muscle contraction. However, the analysis of these signals still presents many challenges since similar gestures result in similar muscle contractions. Thus the resulting signal shapes are almost identical, leading to low classification accuracy. To tackle this challenge, complex neu…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Concordia Institute for Information System Engineering (CIISE)（康考迪亚大学信息系统工程研究所（CIISE））；Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Concordia University（康考迪亚大学电气与计算机工程系（ECE））；Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院生物工程系）；Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, New York University (NYU)（纽约大学（NYU）电气与计算机工程及机械与航空航天工程系）；New York University (NYU)（纽约大学（NYU））；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
There has been a surge of recent interest in Machine Learning (ML), particularly Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based models, to decode muscle activities from surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals for myoelectric control of neurorobotic systems. DNN-based models, however, require large training sets and, typically, have high structural complexity, i.e., they depend on a large number of trainable parameters. To address these issues, we developed a framework based on the Transformer architecture for processing sEMG signals. We propose a novel Vision Transformer (ViT)-based neural network architectu…
Artificial Intelligence Thrust, HKUST (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）人工智能方向）；School of Computing and Information Technology, Great Bay University（湾区大学计算机与信息技术学院）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST（香港科技大学计算机科学与工程系）；Guangzhou HKUST Fok Ying Tung Research Institute（广州香港科技大学霍英东研究院）
Concordat University（康考迪亚大学）；Concordia Institute for Information System Engineering (CITIES)（康考迪亚信息系统工程研究所（CITIES））
Recently, there has been a surge of significant interest on application of Deep Learning (DL) models to autonomously perform hand gesture recognition using surface Electromyogram (sEMG) signals. DL models are, however, mainly designed to be applied on sparse sEMG signals. Furthermore, due to their complex structure, typically, we are faced with memory constraints; require large training times and a large number of training samples, and; there is the need to resort to data augmentation and/or transfer learning. In this paper, for the first time (to the best of our knowledge), we investigate and…
Surface electromyography (sEMG) is becoming exceeding useful in applications involving analysis of human motion such as in human-machine interface, assistive technology, healthcare and prosthetic development. The proposed work presents a novel dual stage classification approach for classification of grasping gestures from sEMG signals. A statistical assessment of these activities is presented to determine the similar characteristics between the considered activities. Similar activities are grouped together. In the first stage of classification, an activity is identified as belonging to a group…
User Training with Error Augmentation for Electromyogram-based Gesture Classification
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Khoury College of Computer Sciences（科里计算机科学学院）；Meta Reality Labs Research（Meta现实实验室）；Institute for Experiential AI（体验式人工智能研究院）；Department of Physical Therapy, Movement, and Rehabilitation Sciences（物理治疗、运动与康复科学系）
Surface electromyography (sEMG) has gained significant importance during recent advancements in consumer electronics for healthcare systems, gesture analysis and recognition and sign language communication. For such a system, it is imperative to determine the regions of activity in a continuously recorded sEMG signal. The proposed work provides a novel activity detection approach based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) using sEMG signals recorded when various hand gestures are performed. Detection procedure is designed based on a probabilistic outlook by making use of mathematical models. The requ…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Concordia Institute for Information System Engineering（康考迪亚信息系统工程研究院）；New York University（纽约大学）
Capitalizing on the need for addressing the existing challenges associated with gesture recognition via sparse multichannel surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals, the paper proposes a novel deep learning model, referred to as the XceptionTime architecture. The proposed innovative XceptionTime is designed by integration of depthwise separable convolutions, adaptive average pooling, and a novel non-linear normalization technique. At the heart of the proposed architecture is several XceptionTime modules concatenated in series fashion designed to capture both temporal and spatial information-bea…
Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides an intuitive and non-invasive interface from which to control machines. However, preserving the myoelectric control system's performance over multiple days is challenging, due to the transient nature of the signals obtained with this recording technique. In practice, if the system is to remain usable, a time-consuming and periodic recalibration is necessary. In the case where the sEMG interface is employed every few days, the user might need to do this recalibration before every use. Thus, severely limiting the practicality of such a control method. Con…
Deep learning-based Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) via surface Electromyogram (sEMG) signals has recently shown significant potential for development of advanced myoelectric-controlled prosthesis. Existing deep learning approaches, typically, include only one model as such can hardly maintain acceptable generalization performance in changing scenarios. In this paper, we aim to address this challenge by capitalizing on the recent advances of hybrid models and transformers. In other words, we propose a hybrid framework based on the transformer architecture, which is a relatively new and revoluti…
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are appealing for the purpose of classification of hand movements from surface electromyography (sEMG) data because they have the ability to perform automated person-specific feature extraction from raw data. In this paper, we make the novel contribution of proposing and evaluating a design for the early processing layers in the deep CNN for multichannel sEMG. Specifically, we propose a novel temporal-to-spatial (TtS) CNN architecture, where the first layer performs convolution separately on each sEMG channel to extract temporal features. This is motiv…
In this paper, we present electromyography analysis of human activity - database 1 (EMAHA-DB1), a novel dataset of multi-channel surface electromyography (sEMG) signals to evaluate the activities of daily living (ADL). The dataset is acquired from 25 able-bodied subjects while performing 22 activities categorised according to functional arm activity behavioral system (FAABOS) (3 - full hand gestures, 6 - open/close office draw, 8 - grasping and holding of small office objects, 2 - flexion and extension of finger movements, 2 - writing and 1 - rest). The sEMG data is measured by a set of five N…
In this study, the four joint time-frequency (TF) moments; mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis of TF matrix obtained from Multivariate Synchrosqueezing Transform (MSST) are proposed as features for hand gesture recognition. A publicly available dataset containing surface EMG (sEMG) signals of 40 subjects performing 10 hand gestures, was used. The distinguishing power of the feature variables for the tested gestures was evaluated according to their p values obtained from the Kruskal-Wallis (KW) test. It is concluded that the mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis of TF matrices can be candid…
Integrated Sensing and Communications for Real-time Avatar Control in XR over 5G
IDLab, University of Antwerp - imec（ID实验室，安特卫普大学 - imec）；IDLab, Ghent University - imec（ID实验室，根特大学 - imec）；Lighting Technology Lab, KU Leuven（照明技术实验室，鲁汶大学）
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Concordia Institute for Information System Engineering（康考迪亚信息系统工程研究院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；New York University（纽约大学）
Advances in biosignal signal processing and machine learning, in particular Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), have paved the way for the development of innovative Human-Machine Interfaces for decoding the human intent and controlling artificial limbs. DNN models have shown promising results with respect to other algorithms for decoding muscle electrical activity, especially for recognition of hand gestures. Such data-driven models, however, have been challenged by their need for a large number of trainable parameters and their structural complexity. Here we propose the novel Temporal Convolutions-b…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Concordia Institute of Information Systems Engineering (CIISE)（康考迪亚信息系统工程研究院）；New York University (NYU)（纽约大学）；UNSW SYDNEY（悉尼新南威尔士大学）
Development of advance surface Electromyogram (sEMG)-based Human-Machine Interface (HMI) systems is of paramount importance to pave the way towards emergence of futuristic Cyber-Physical-Human (CPH) worlds. In this context, the main focus of recent literature was on development of different Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based architectures that perform Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) at a macroscopic level (i.e., directly from sEMG signals). At the same time, advancements in acquisition of High-Density sEMG signals (HD-sEMG) have resulted in a surge of significant interest on sEMG decomposition tec…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Concordia Institute for Information System Engineering（康考迪亚信息系统工程研究所）
Advancements in Biological Signal Processing (BSP) and Machine-Learning (ML) models have paved the path for development of novel immersive Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI). In this context, there has been a surge of significant interest in Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) utilizing Surface-Electromyogram (sEMG) signals. This is due to its unique potential for decoding wearable data to interpret human intent for immersion in Mixed Reality (MR) environments. To achieve the highest possible accuracy, complicated and heavy-weighted Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are typically developed, which restricts t…
Statistical models of Surface electromyography (sEMG) signals have several applications such as better understanding of sEMG signal generation, improved pattern recognition based control of wearable exoskeletons and prostheses, improving training strategies in sports activities, and EMG simulation studies. Most of the existing studies analysed the statistical model of sEMG signals acquired under isometric contractions. However, there is no study that addresses the statistical model under isotonic contractions. In this work, a new dataset, electromyography analysis of human activities - databas…
Surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals result from muscle movement and hence they are an ideal candidate for benchmarking event-driven sensing and computing. We propose a simple yet novel approach for optimizing the spike encoding algorithm's hyper-parameters inspired by the readout layer concept in reservoir computing. Using a simple machine learning algorithm after spike encoding, we report performance higher than the state-of-the-art spiking neural networks on two open-source datasets for hand gesture recognition. The spike encoded data is processed through a spiking reservoir with a biologi…
Institute of Neuroinformatics（神经信息学研究所）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Modena e Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
Discrimination of hand gestures based on the decoding of surface electromyography (sEMG) signals is a well-establish approach for controlling prosthetic devices and for Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI). However, despite the promising results achieved by this approach in well-controlled experimental conditions, its deployment in long-term real-world application scenarios is still hindered by several challenges. One of the most critical challenges is maintaining high EMG data classification performance across multiple days without retraining the decoding system. The drop in performance is mostly d…
