Movement Recognition via Channel-Activation-Wise sEMG Attention

Abstract

ContextSurface electromyography (sEMG) signals contain rich information recorded from muscle movements and therefore reflect the users intention. sEMG has seen dominant applications in reha-bilitation, clinical diagnosis as well as human engineering, etc. However, current feature extraction methods for sEMG signals have been seriously limited by its stochasticity, transiency, non-stationarity. Objective: Our objective is to combat the difficulties induced by the aforementioned downsides of sEMG and thereby extract representative features for various downstream movement recognition. MethodWe propose a novel 3-axis view of sEMG features composed of temporal, spatial, and channel-wise summary. We leverage the state-of-the-art architecture Transformer to enforce efficient parallel search and to get rid of limitations imposed by previous work in gesture classification. ResultsWe compared the proposed method against existing methods on two Ninapro datasets consisting of data from both healthy people and amputees. Experimental results show the proposed method attains the state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on both datasets. We further show that the proposed method enjoys strong generalization ability: a new SOTA is achieved by pretraining the model on a different dataset followed by fine-tuning it on the target dataset.