Pattern recognition of surface electromyography signal based on wavelet coefficient entropy

This paper introduced a novel, simple and effective method to extract the general feature of two surface EMG (electromyography) signal patterns: forearm supination (FS) surface EMG signal and forearm pronation (FP) surface EMG signal. After surface EMG (SEMG) signal was decomposed to the fourth resolution level with wavelet packet transform (WPT), its whole scaling space (with frequencies in the interval (0Hz, 500Hz]) was divided into16 frequency bands (FB). Then wavelet coefficient entropy (WCE) of every FB was calculated and correspondingly marked with WCE(n) (from the nth FB, n=1,2,...16). Lastly, some WCE(n) were chosen to form WCE feature vector, which was used to distinguish FS surface EMG signals from FP surface EMG signals. The result showed that the WCE feather vector consisted of WCE(7) (187.25Hz, 218.75Hz) and WCE(8) (218.75Hz, 250Hz) can more effectively recognize FS and FP patterns than other WCE feature vector or the WPT feature vector which was gained by the combination of WPT and principal components analysis.