Window length insensitive real-time EMG hand gesture classification using entropy calculated from globally parsed histograms

Electromyography (EMG) signal classification is vital to diagnose musculoskeletal abnormalities and control devices by motion intention detection. Machine learning assists both areas by classifying conditions or motion intentions. This paper proposes a novel window length insensitive EMG classification method utilizing the Entropy feature. The main goal of this study is to show that entropy can be used as the only feature for fast real-time classification of EMG signals of hand gestures. The main goal of this study is to show that entropy can be used as the only feature for fast real-time classification of EMG signals of hand gestures. Additionally, the entropy feature can classify feature vectors of different sliding window lengths without including them in the training data. Many kinds of entropy feature succeeded in electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) classification research. However, to the best of our knowledge, the Entropy Feature proposed by Shannon stays untested for EMG classification to this day. All the machine learning models are tested on datasets NinaPro DB5 and the newly collected SingleMyo. As an initial analysis to test the entropy feature, classic Machine Learning (ML) models are trained on the NinaPro DB5 dataset. This stage showed that except for the K Nearest Neighbor (kNN) with high inference time, Support Vector Machines (SVM) gave the best validation accuracy. Later, SVM models trained with feature vectors created by 1 s (200 samples) sliding windows are tested on feature vectors created by 250 ms (50 samples) to 1500 ms (300 samples) sliding windows. This experiment resulted in slight accuracy differences through changing window length, indicating that the Entropy feature is insensitive to this parameter. Lastly, Locally Parsed Histogram (LPH), typical in standard entropy functions, makes learning hard for ML methods. Globally Parsed Histogram (GPH) was proposed, and classification accuracy increased from 60.35% to 89.06% while window length insensitivity is preserved. This study shows that Shannon’s entropy is a compelling feature with low window length sensitivity for EMG hand gesture classification. The effect of the GPH approach against an easy-to-make mistake LPH is shown. A real-time classification algorithm for the entropy features is tested on the newly created SingleMyo dataset.