Improved High-Density Myoelectric Pattern Recognition Control Against Electrode Shift Using Data Augmentation and Dilated Convolutional Neural Network

OBJECTIVE: the objective of this work is to develop a robust method for myoelectric control towards alleviating the interference of electrode shift. M ethods: In the proposed method, a preprocessing approach was first performed to convert high-density surface electromyogram (HD-sEMG) signals into a series of images, and the electrode shift appeared as pixel shift in these images. Next, a data augmentation approach was applied to the training data from just one position (no shift), so as to simulate HD-sEMG images derived from fictitious shift positions. The dilated convolutional neural network (DCNN) was subsequently adopted for classification. Compared to common convolutional neural network, DCNN always contained a larger receptive field that was supposed to be adept at mining wider spatial contextual information in images. This property was further confirmed to facilitate the classification of myoelectric patterns using HD-sEMG. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated with HD-sEMG data recorded by a 10×10 electrode array placed over forearm extensors of ten subjects during their performance of six wrist and finger extension tasks. RESULTS: Under a variety of actual electrode shift conditions, the proposed method achieved a mean classification accuracy of 95.34%, and it outperformed other common methods. CONCLUSION: This work demonstrated feasibility and usability of combining data augmentation and DCNN in predicting myoelectric patterns in the context of electrode shifts. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed method is a practical solution for robust myoelectric control against electrode array shifts.