A fusion of time-domain descriptors for improved myoelectric hand control

© 2016 IEEE. This paper presents a new feature extraction algorithm for the challenging problem of the classification of myoelectric signals for prostheses control. The algorithm employs the orientation between a set of descriptors of muscular activities and a nonlinearly mapped version of them. It incorporates information about the Electromyogram (EMG) signal power spectrum characteristics derived from each analysis window while correlating that with the descriptors of previous windows for robust activity recognition. The proposed idea can be summarized in the following three steps: 1) extract power spectrum moments from the current analysis window and its nonlinearly scaled version in time-domain through Fourier transform relations, 2) compute the orientation between the two sets of moments, and 3) apply data fusion on the resulting orientation features for the current and previous time windows and use the result as the final feature set. EMG data collected from nine transradial amputees performing six classes of movements with different force levels is used to validate the proposed features. When compared to other well-known EMG feature extraction methods, the proposed features produced an improvement of at least 4%