Mitigating the Concurrent Interference of Electrode Shift and Loosening in Myoelectric Pattern Recognition Using Siamese Autoencoder Network

The objective of this work is to develop a novel myoelectric pattern recognition (MPR) method to mitigate the concurrent interference of electrode shift and loosening, thereby improving the practicality of MPR-based gestural interfaces towards intelligent control. A Siamese auto-encoder network (SAEN) was established to learn robust feature representations against random occurrences of both electrode shift and loosening. The SAEN model was trained with a variety of shifted-view and masked-view feature maps, which were simulated through feature transformation operated on the original feature maps. Specifically, three mean square error (MSE) losses were devised to warrant the trained model’s capability in adaptive recovery of any given interfered data. The SAEN was deployed as an independent feature extractor followed by a common support vector machine acting as the classifier. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, an eight-channel armband was adopted to collect surface electromyography (EMG) signals from nine subjects performing six gestures. Under the condition of concurrent interference, the proposed method achieved the highest classification accuracy in both offline and online testing compared to five common methods, with statistical significance (p <0.05). The proposed method was demonstrated to be effective in mitigating the electrode shift and loosening interferences. Our work offers a valuable solution for enhancing the robustness of myoelectric control systems.