Evaluation of surface EMG features for the recognition of American Sign Language gestures

In this work, analysis of the surface electromyogram (sEMG) signal is proposed for the recognition of American sign language (ASL) gestures. To this purpose, sixteen features are extracted from the sEMG signal acquired from the user's forearm, and evaluated by the Mahalanobis distance criterion. Discriminant analysis is used to reduce the number of features used in the classification of the signed ASL gestures. The proposed features are tested against noise resulting in a further reduced set of features, which are evaluated for their discriminant ability. The classification results reveal that 97.7% of the inspected ASL gestures were correctly recognized using sEMG-based features, providing a promising solution to the automatic ASL gesture recognition problem.