Transfer Learning-Based Muscle Activity Decoding Scheme by Low-frequency sEMG for Wearable Low-cost Application

The surface electromyogram (sEMG) contains a wealth of motion information, which can reflect user's muscle motion intentions. The decoding based on sEMG has been widely used to provide a safe and effective human-computer interaction (HCI) method for neural prosthesis and exoskeleton robot control. The motor intention decoding based on low sampling frequency sEMG may promote the application of wearable low-cost EMG sensors in HCI. Therefore, a motor intention decoding scheme suitable for low frequency EMG signal is proposed in this paper, that is, transfer learning based on Alexnet. Moreover, the effects of different feature extraction methods and data augmentation with Gaussian white noise are fully analyzed. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with the NinaPro database 5. The highest accuracy can reach 70.4%±4.36% in 53 gestures identification of 10 subjects. Some classical machine learning algorithms such as support vector machine (SVM), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) are chosen to make comparison, where the SVM with Gaussian kernel function reaches to the maximum accuracy of 67.98%±4.56%. Two-way variance results show significant differences between each other. The experiment results show that the transfer learning is effective for decoding low-frequency sEMG for a large number of gestures.