Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition via Electromyographic Signal Based on Convolutional Neural Network

Dynamic gesture recognition is a typical human-computer interaction method owing to its great potential in practical applications. Currently, most of research work on gesture recognition has mainly focused on vision-based and surface electromyography (sEMG) methods. Compared to vision-based methods, the sequential sEMG signal can directly depict the muscle activity of different gestures which could lead to higher recognition efficiency. However, the effective feature design and selection of sEMG signal is still complicated since muscle fatigue and small electrode displacement will affect the recognition precision of sEMG signals. In this paper, a novel end-to-end dynamic gesture recognition method is developed. The raw sEMG signals are converted into an image form by using the time-frequency transformation method to obtain more comprehensive information for model training and test. And a recognition model based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is built for high-precision time-frequency image recognition. Experiments indicate that the proposed method could acquire distinguishing features from the pre-prossed images and the overall recognition accuracy on different gestures can reach up to 98.3%.