A NOVEL APPROACH FOR THE PATTERN RECOGNITION OF HAND MOVEMENTS BASED ON EMG AND VPMCD

Essentially, the classification of human hand movements is a process of pattern recognition. However, existing computationally intense and complex pattern recognition methods have failed thus far to be optimally successful in constructing associations between extracted signal features. Due to such limitations, a new pattern recognition method using variable predictive model-based class discrimination (VPMCD) is proposed. This approach considers that the feature values can exhibit inter-relations in nature and such associations will show different forms in different classes. In practice, this is always true for different hand movements. The signals produced by electromyography (EMG) and received from human arm muscles, are characteristically non-linear and non-stationary. A novel hand gesture recognition technique, based on wavelet feature extraction and VPMCD is proposed. First, the maximum values of the wavelet coefficient are extracted as the feature vectors from the surface EMG signals after de-noising. Then, the feature values are regarded as the inputs of the VPMCD classifier. Finally, four movement patterns (hand clenching, hand extension, wrist flexion, and wrist extension) are identified by the outputs of the VPMCD classifier. Our analysis results show that the proposed pattern recognition approach can distinguish different gestures successfully and effectively. Simultaneously, compared with the artificial neural network and the support vector machine classifier, more accurate recognition can be achieved using our proposed technique.