Identification of EMG signals using discriminant analysis and SVM classifier

The electromyography (EMG) signal is a bioelectrical signal variation, generated in muscles during voluntary or involuntary muscle activities. The muscle activities such as contraction or relaxation are always controlled by the nervous system. The EMG signal is a complicated biomedical signal due to anatomical/physiological properties of the muscles and its noisy environment. In this paper, a classification technique is proposed to classify signals required for a prosperous arm prosthesis control by using surface EMG signals. This work uses recorded EMG signals generated by biceps and triceps muscles for four different movements. Each signal has one single pattern and it is essential to separate and classify these patterns properly. Discriminant analysis and support vector machine (SVM) classifier have been used to classify four different arm movement signals. Prior to classification, proper feature vectors are derived from the signal. The feature vectors are generated by using mean absolute value (MAV). These feature vectors are provided as inputs to the identification/classification system. Discriminant analysis using five different approaches, classification accuracy rates achieved from very good (98%) to poor (96%) by using 10-fold cross validation. SVM classifier gives a very good average accuracy rate (99%) for four movements with the classification error rate 1%. Correct classification rates of the applied techniques are very high which can be used to classify EMG signals for prosperous arm prosthesis control studies. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.