MEET: Mixture of Experts Extra Tree-Based sEMG Hand Gesture Identification

TL;DR

This paper introduces the MEET model, a mixture of expert extra trees, to improve the accuracy of hand gesture recognition using surface electromyography signals, addressing multi-class and bias challenges.

Contribution

The paper proposes the MEET model, combining multiple expert models and a gating mechanism, to enhance hand gesture classification accuracy over existing methods.

Findings

MEET outperformed other classifiers in accuracy.

The model effectively handled multi-class hand gesture recognition.

Results demonstrated robustness across six gestures and eleven models.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in recent years and opened up new possibilities in exploring applications in various fields such as biomedical, robotics, education, industry, etc. Among these fields, human hand gesture recognition is a subject of study that has recently emerged as a research interest in robotic hand control using electromyography (EMG). Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a primary technique used in EMG, which is popular due to its non-invasive nature and is used to capture gesture movements using signal acquisition devices placed on the surface of the forearm. Moreover, these signals are pre-processed to extract significant handcrafted features through time and frequency domain analysis. These are helpful and act as input to machine learning (ML) models to identify hand gestures. However, handling multiple classes and biases are major limitations that can affect the performance of an ML model. Therefore, to address this issue, a new mixture of experts extra tree (MEET) model is proposed to identify more accurate and effective hand gesture movements. This model combines individual ML models referred to as experts, each focusing on a minimal class of two. Moreover, a fully trained model known as the gate is employed to weigh the output of individual expert models. This amalgamation of the expert models with the gate model is known as a mixture of experts extra tree (MEET) model. In this study, four subjects with six hand gesture movements have been considered and their identification is evaluated among eleven models, including the MEET classifier. Results elucidate that the MEET classifier performed best among other algorithms and identified hand gesture movement accurately.