A force levels and gestures integrated multi-task strategy for neural decoding

This paper discusses the problem of decoding gestures represented by surface electromyography (sEMG) signals in the presence of variable force levels. It is an attempt that multi-task learning (MTL) is proposed to recognize gestures and force levels synchronously. First, methods of gesture recognition with different force levels are investigated. Then, MTL framework is presented to improve the gesture recognition performance and give information about force levels. Last but not least, to solve the problem that using the greedy principle in MTL, a modified pseudo-task augmentation (PTA) trajectory is introduced. Experiments conducted on two representative datasets demonstrate that compared with other methods, frequency domain information with convolutional neural network (CNN) is more suitable for gesture recognition with variable force levels. Besides, the feasibility of extracting features that are closely related to both gestures and force levels is verified via MTL. By influencing learning dynamics, the proposed PTA method can improve the results of all tasks, and make it applicable to the case where the main tasks and auxiliary tasks are clear.