Short latency hand movement classification based on surface EMG spectrogram with PCA

Hand gesture recognition from forearm surface electromyography (sEMG) is an active research field in the development of motor prosthesis. Studies have shown that classification accuracy and efficiency is highly dependent on the features extracted from the EMG. In this paper, we show that EMG spectrograms are a particularly effective feature for discriminating multiple classes of hand gesture when subjected to principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction. We tested our method on the Ninapro database which includes sEMG data (12 channels) of 40 subjects performing 50 different hand movements. Our results demonstrate improved classification accuracy (by ∼10%) over purely time domain features for 50 different hand movements, including small finger movements and different levels of force exertion. Our method has also reduced the error rate (by ∼12%) at the transition phase of gestures which could improve robustness of gesture recognition when continuous classification from sEMG is required.