emg2pose: A Large and Diverse Benchmark for Surface Electromyographic Hand Pose Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces emg2pose, a comprehensive benchmark dataset for surface electromyographic hand pose estimation, enabling improved generalization and new control schemes for human-computer interaction in virtual and augmented reality.

Contribution

The paper presents the largest publicly available sEMG hand pose dataset, emg2pose, with diverse users, gestures, and sensor placements, facilitating research on robust sEMG-based hand pose inference.

Findings

Provides high-quality sEMG and pose data from 193 users

Establishes baseline models and evaluation tasks for generalization

Enables research on sensor placement and user variability

Abstract

Hands are the primary means through which humans interact with the world. Reliable and always-available hand pose inference could yield new and intuitive control schemes for human-computer interactions, particularly in virtual and augmented reality. Computer vision is effective but requires one or multiple cameras and can struggle with occlusions, limited field of view, and poor lighting. Wearable wrist-based surface electromyography (sEMG) presents a promising alternative as an always-available modality sensing muscle activities that drive hand motion. However, sEMG signals are strongly dependent on user anatomy and sensor placement, and existing sEMG models have required hundreds of users and device placements to effectively generalize. To facilitate progress on sEMG pose inference, we introduce the emg2pose benchmark, the largest publicly available dataset of high-quality hand pose labels and wrist sEMG recordings. emg2pose contains 2kHz, 16 channel sEMG and pose labels from a 26-camera motion capture rig for 193 users, 370 hours, and 29 stages with diverse gestures - a scale comparable to vision-based hand pose datasets. We provide competitive baselines and challenging tasks evaluating real-world generalization scenarios: held-out users, sensor placements, and stages. emg2pose provides the machine learning community a platform for exploring complex generalization problems, holding potential to significantly enhance the development of sEMG-based human-computer interactions.