Key result
Adding DCGAN-generated synthetic EMG data to real training data increased average classification accuracy by 2.66% for SVM and RF classifiers, demonstrating the utility of synthetic data enhancement.
Why the study?
Bio-signal acquisition from the human body requires strict setups and ethical approvals, leading to limited training data for classifiers.
Effect estimate: 2.66% increase
Absolute Event Rate: 61.85% vs 59.19%
p-value: p=not statistically significant
DCGAN-generated synthetic EMG data can enrich training datasets and slightly improve hand motion classification accuracy when combined with real data.
Synthetic EMG augmentation may modestly aid classification; leaves open clinical utility in prosthetics or rehab.
The acquisition of bio-signal from the human body requires a strict experimental setup and ethical approvements, which leads to limited data for the training of classifiers in the era of big data. It will change the situation if synthetic data can be generated based on real data. This article proposes such a kind of multiple channel electromyography (EMG) data enhancement method using a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN). The generation procedure is as follows: First, the multiple channels of EMG signals within sliding windows are converted to grayscale images through matrix transformation, normalization, and histogram equalization. Second, the grayscale images of each class are used to train DCGAN so that synthetic grayscale images of each class can be generated with the input of random noises. To evaluate whether the synthetic data own the similarity and diversity with the real data, the classification accuracy index is adopted in this article. A public EMG dataset (that is, ISR Myo-I) for hand motion recognition is used to prove the usability of the proposed method. The experimental results show that adding synthetic data to the training data has little effect on the classification performance, indicating the similarity between real data and synthetic data. Moreover, it is also noted that the average accuracy (five classes) is slightly increased by 1%-2% for support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF), respectively, with additional synthetic data for training. Although the improvement is not statistically significant, it implies that the generated data by DCGAN own its new characteristics, and it is possible to enrich the diversity of the training dataset. In addition, cross-validation analysis shows that the synthetic samples have large inter-class distance, reflected by higher cross-validation accuracy of pure synthetic sample classification. Furthermore, this article also demonstrates that histogram equalization can significantly improve the performance of EMG-based hand motion recognition.
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Chen et al. (2022) studied Hand motion classification (n=6). DCGAN-based synthetic data generation and histogram equalization vs. Real EMG data only was evaluated on Classification accuracy (2.66% increase, p=not statistically significant). Adding DCGAN-generated synthetic EMG data to real training data increased average classification accuracy by 2.66% for SVM and RF classifiers, demonstrating the utility of synthetic data enhancement.
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