A Perifacial EMG Acquisition System for Facial-Muscle-Movement Recognition.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

This paper proposes a portable wireless transmission system for the multi-channel acquisition of surface electromyography (EMG) signals. Because EMG signals have great application value in psychotherapy and human-computer interaction, this system is designed to acquire reliable, real-time facial-muscle-movement signals. Electrodes placed on the surface of a facial-muscle source can inhibit facial-muscle movement due to weight, size, etc., and we propose to solve this problem by placing the electrodes at the periphery of the face to acquire the signals. The multi-channel approach allows this system to detect muscle activity in 16 regions simultaneously. Wireless transmission (Wi-Fi) technology is employed to increase the flexibility of portable applications. The sampling rate is 1 KHz and the resolution is 24 bit. To verify the reliability and practicality of this system, we carried out a comparison with a commercial device and achieved a correlation coefficient of more than 70% on the comparison metrics. Next, to test the system's utility, we placed 16 electrodes around the face for the recognition of five facial movements. Three classifiers, random forest, support vector machine (SVM) and backpropagation neural network (BPNN), were used for the recognition of the five facial movements, in which random forest proved to be practical by achieving a classification accuracy of 91.79%. It is also demonstrated that electrodes placed around the face can still achieve good recognition of facial movements, making the landing of wearable EMG signal-acquisition devices more feasible.

Authors

  • Jianhang Zhang
    School of Computer Science, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang 212003, China.
  • Shucheng Huang
    School of Computer Science, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang 212003, China.
  • Jingting Li
    State Key Laboratory of Organ Failure Research, Key Laboratory of Mental Health of the Ministry of Education, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Psychiatric Disorders, Department of Neurobiology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, 510515, China.
  • Yan Wang
    College of Animal Science and Technology, Beijing University of Agriculture, Beijing, China.
  • Zizhao Dong
    CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology & Department of Psychology, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
  • Su-Jing Wang
    Key Laboratory of Behavior Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China. wangsujing@psych.ac.cn.