The 20th INTERNATIONAL DAAAM SYMPOSIUM

"Intelligent Manufacturing & Automation: Theory, Practice & Education" 25-28th November 2009, Vienna, Austria

CLASSIFICATION OF ELECTROMYOGRAPHIC SIGNALS USING AUTOREGRESSIVE MODELING

MAN, S[ergiu]; HERLE, S[orin] & LAZEA, Gh[eorghe]
Abstract: The electromyographic signal, collected from the skin surface has been intensively used for the control of upper limb prosthesis. In recent years, numerous methods have been developed for accurate and efficient classifying of the surface electromyographical signals. This paper presents an algorithm based on autoregressive (AR) model representation associated with a neural network classifier. The purpose of the research is to determine the best neural network configuration and AR model for an optimum classification of the electromyographical signals. The results had shown that a low order autoregressive model in combination with a feed forward neural network achieves a high classification at a low computational cost. Key words: EMG signal, autoregressive model, neural networks.

Fig. 1. The architecture of the system. The system contains four differential EMG sensors, an amplification unit and an input module for interfacing the sensors with the amplifier. EMG signals collected from the surface of the skin have a very low magnitude (0 5 mV) and special EMG sensors with high noise tolerance and good sensitivity are used. For noise rejection simple differential sensors were used. The surface EMG signals are collected from biceps and triceps using two differential myoelectric sensors. An accurate acquisition of EMG signal is vital in order to obtain a high classification rate. For the amplifier it was chosen a gain value of 1000, as it provided a very high signal to noise ratio. After multiple tests it was observed that a gain of 10000 provided a signal severely corrupted by a 50 Hz noise. The A/D conversion was performed using a NI USB-6009 AD card from NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS. As the system must meet certain real-time requirements, adjacent time segments with lengths of 256 samples each were processed at each step. The signal was acquired with 1000 samples per second. The value had been chosen considering that the response time of the control system should be equal or less than 300 ms (Oskoei & Hu, 2007). The upper limb movements were detected using a goniometer and each class of movements has been associated with a correspondent segment of the myoelectric signal. The processing stage of EMG signal consist of three steps: filtering, feature extraction using AR modeling and classification using neural networks. The next section will present the techniques used in each step.  2.1 Filtering As Soares et al. (2003) suggested, the power spectrum of the signal is concentrated in the 20-500 Hz range. Also, the histogram analysis revealed a 50 Hz noise from the power line. For limiting the bandwidth and rejecting the power line noise a combination of a bandpass filter and a notch filter centered on a 50 Hz was used.

1. INTRODUCTION
Myoelectric controlled prosthesis has been in the recent years the best solution for people with congenital defects or who have lost their limbs in accidents. Unfortunately, technology has not yet fully resolved this subject and one of the biggest challenges remains the control of these devices. Electromyography is the study of muscle functions through the analysis of the electrical signal associated with the contraction of the muscle. The electromyographic (EMG) signal can provide useful information about ones attempt to initiate a movement and therefore can be used as an input in control scheme architecture for prosthesis. There are two basic approaches when designing a myoelectric control system: pattern-recognition based approach and non pattern-recognition based approach (Oskoei & Hu, 2007). In the last years the classification algorithms have become more and more complex, the greatest success in myoelectric control has been realized by pattern recognition based controllers (Englehart et al., 1999). Classification of EMG signal represents the center point of any myoelectric controller. It has the role to achieve a certain class label for each input. Neural networks (Englehart et al., 1999), fuzzy logic (Micera et al., 2000) and neural-fuzzy systems (Karlik et al., 2003) are all used in this purpose with great success. Multi-layer perceptron is a very commonly used neural network (NN) architecture for EMG signal classification and it will be discussed in one of the next sections. In this paper we investigate the performance of a classifier for four classes of movement (flexion, extension, pronation and supination) using autoregressive (AR) modeling and a multilayer perceptron neural network.

2. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
As Fig. 1 illustrates, the EMG signal collected from the surface of the skin passes through four important stages: acquisition, amplification, A/D conversion and processing. In the following section the four stages up-mentioned are discussed, with emphasis on their importance for the control system. A Bagnoli 4 system from DELSYS Inc. was used for data acquisition.

2.2 Feature extraction AR modeling of the EMG signal offers very good performance in EMG signal classification. One of the main advantages is that it combines two stages: feature extraction and dimensionality reduction as it leads to a small dimension feature vector. Therefore processing time is reduced. AR model is based on the ec. 1:
(1)

(2) - estimating the prediction error: (3) - updating the AR-coefficients: (4) We used a constant of convergence =0.01, based on results of multiple tries. The most important step in AR modeling is the choice of the model order. Farina and Merletti (2000) suggested a model of order 10 and Soares et al. (2003) compared models of order 4 and 10 and achieved similar performances. 2.3 Cl ssifi i The sets of the extracted features must be classified into distinctive classes, corresponding to the desired motion patterns. Due to the abilit of NN to represent both linear and non-linear relationships and to learn the relationships directl from the data being processed, in this paper, a multi-layer perceptron (M ) neural network was chosen. The classification task has been divided into two stages: training stage and test stage. In the former, pairs of input values and corresponding targets are feed to the neural network. An iterative backpropagation algorithm (Levenberg-Marquardt method) was used to adapt the networks weights for a number of 200 epochs. The number of epochs was chosen after observing the behavior of the training process for a number of trials. There were recorded a set of 200 training patterns and 100 test patterns for each of four classes of motion (flexion, extension, pronation and supination) when training the network. Patterns used for training were not used for test. There are two major unknowns in the classification problem. The first is the AR model order witch models the signal, and the second one is the number of neurons in the hidden layer of the neural network. For the determination of the two a series of trials had been performed, and the results were presented in Table 1 by the error rates for each configuration. They were expressed in percents. In the interpretation of the results we must consider the fact that a lower model order and a smaller si e of the hidden layer of the neural network leads to a faster response of the system and therefore, makes possible the implementation on an embedded system. Also, as Table 1 indicates, a three order AR model performs very well for a large domain of neural network structures. Number of neurons in hidden layer 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 1 8 7.5 5 4.5 3.5 7 4.5 4 2 4.5 3.5 4.5 3 4.5 4.5 2 4 3 3.5 3 2.5 2 2 3.5 2.5 3.5 4 3.5 2.5 3 4.5 5.5 5.5 6.5 3.5 5 4.5 6 5 6.5 3 1.5 3.5 2 6 3 7 2.5 4 3.5 2.5 3 6.5 7 3 3.5 2.5 3 3.5 3 3 3 8 9 3 3.5 2.5 1.5 4 4 4 9 4.5 3 3 2 6.5 3 6.5 3.5 10 4 3.5 6 2.5 5 2 2.5 6 Tab. 1. The error rate for the test set Model order
     

A fifth order AR model and 11 neurons in the hidden layer of the neural network lead to a 98.5 % rate of classification. By increasing the number of coefficients, or by increasing the number of hidden layer neurons, no significant improvement was found. Even though the fifth order model offers the best classification rate, we can also consider a second order model in combination with a neural network structure with 12 neurons in the hidden layer, which offers a good solution considering computational costs. This solution also is viable for embedded implementation, as the algorithm implies a small number of complex operations.


4. CONCL

This paper describes an algorithm for acquiring, analyzing and classifying electromyographic signals. We have used a method witch combined the autoregressive modeling technique and multi-layer perceptron neural network in order to enhance the classification rate of EM signals into the corresponding class of movement. The results significantly improve the ones of Soares el al. (2003), reducing the complexity and the computational requirements of the classifier. As it had been shown, a two or a fifth AR model order is sufficient for generating enough information for the neural network to discriminate between four classes of movements. Also, the use of MLP as a classifier makes it easy to enhance the scheme capabilities in the future, using on-line learning techniques or increasing the number of motion classes. The results of this research will be used in developing a microcontroller based prosthesis.
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5. ACKNOWLE

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This research was supported by PR DOC (THE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT OF PHD STUDIES IN ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES).

6. RE ERENCES
Englehart, K.; Hudgins, B.; Parker P.; Stevenson M. (1999). Classification of the myoelectric signal using time frequency basd representations. Medi al Engineering & Physi s, Vol. 21, No. 6-7, (July - September 1993), page numbers (431438), ISSN: 1350-4533 Farina, D.; Merletti, R. (2000).Comparison of algorithms for estimation of EMG variables during voluntary isometric contractions. Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology, Vol. 10, No. 5, (October 2000) page numbers (337-349), ISSN: 1050-6411 Karlik, B.; Osman Tokhi, M. & Alci, M. (2003). A fuzzy clustering neural network architecture for multifunction upper-limb prosthesis. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 50, No. 11, (November 2003) page numbers (1255-1261), ISSN: 0018-9294 Micera, S.; Sabatini, A. M. & Dario, P. (2000). On automatic identification of upper-limb movements using small-sized training sets of EMG signals. Journal of Medical Engineering and Physics, Vol. 22, No. 8, (October 2000) page numbers 527-533, ISSN: 1350-4533 Oskoei, M.; Hu, H. (2007). Myoelectric control systems A survey. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, Vol. 2, No. 4, (October 2007) page numbers (275-294), ISSN: 1746-8094 Soares, A.; Andrade, A.; Lamounier, E. & Carrijo, R. (2003). The Development of a Virtual Myoelectric Prosthesis Controlled by an EMG Pattern Recognition System Based on Neural Networks. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Vol. 21, No. 2, (September 2003) page numbers (127-141), ISSN: 0925-9902
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Where ai are the AR coefficient N i the di ension of the ti e is the model order, x are the samples of the segment signal and are the samples of the modeled signal . In calculating the AR coefficients we followed the steps suggested in (Soares et al , 2003): - initiali ing the filter coefficients. - calculating the predicted value of the input signal

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