The myoelectric signal (MES) with broad applications in various areas especially in prosthetics and myoelectric control, is one of the biosignals utilized in helping humans to control equipments. In this paper, a technique for feature extraction of forearm electromyographic (EMG) signals using wavelet packet transform (WPT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. In the first step, the WPT is employed to generate a wavelet decomposition tree from which features are extracted. In the second step, an algorithm based on singular value decomposition (SVD) method is introduced to compute the feature vectors for every hand motion. This technique can successfully identify eight hand motions including forearm pronation, forearm supination, wrist flexion, wrist abduction, wrist adduction, chuck grip, spread fingers and rest state. These motions can be obtained by measuring the surface EMG signal through sixteen electrodes mounted on the pronator and supinator teres, flexor digitorum, sublimas, extensor digitorum communis, and flexor and extensor carpi ulnaris. Moreover, through quantitative comparison with other feature extraction methods like entropy concept in this paper, SVD method has a better performance. The results showed that proposed technique can achieve a classification recognition accuracy of over 96% for the eight hand motions.
