Application and Improvement of MFCC in Gesture Recognition with Surface Electromyography

As a physiological signal reflecting the state of muscle activation, surface electromyography (sEMG) plays a vital role in the assessment of neuromuscular health, human-computer interaction, and gait analysis. Inspired by the audio signal analysis outcome that features extracted with Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) empower better representation, this paper proposes a comparative study of a gesture recognition method by using and improving with the MFCC features of sEMG. Comparing and combining with the conventional time-domain and frequency-domain features, different learning-based techniques are deployed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on the NinaPro datasets. The proposed approach was evaluated on the NinaPro-DB1 and NinaPro-DB2 datasets, achieving the improvements of 3.42% and 3.67%, respectively, in terms of the highest accuracy using the standard MFCC method. Correspondingly, when combined with the improved MFCC, the accuracy was further increased, reaching the maximum values of 89.82% and 87.82%, respectively, on the two datasets. The impact on the performance reveals the effectiveness of MFCC, and the results show that the proposed method has the potential to realize high-precision gesture recognition.