An Exploratory Study of Single Channel Surface Electromyography for Hand Gesture Classification

Abstract:Accurate hand gesture recognition using surface electromyography (sEMG) typically relies on multichannel sensor arrays and computationally intensive models. This limits practical deployment in low-power and embedded systems. This study investigates the feasibility of classifying ten hand gestures using a single sEMG channel combined with lightweight machine learning architectures. Raw sEMG signals were transformed into a comprehensive feature-based representation, including time-domain, frequency-domain, higher-order-crossing, and relative-intensity features. Feature redundancy was reduced using Pearson correlation filtering and the removal of highly correlated features, while dimensionality-reduction techniques (LDA and PCA) were applied selectively. Three classifiers, a feed-forward neural network (NN), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and a support vector machine (SVM), were systematically evaluated across four experiments. Results demonstrate that combining time and frequency features with Pearson filtering and a compact NN can achieve up to 90 percent accuracy, even with limited temporal and spatial information. These findings highlight the potential of single-channel sEMG systems for cost-effective, low-power gesture-recognition applications.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2607.15972 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2607.15972v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15972 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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