Multimodal hand gesture recognition (HGR) systems can achieve higher
recognition accuracy. However, acquiring multimodal gesture recognition data
typically requires users to wear additional sensors, thereby increasing
hardware costs. This paper proposes a novel generative approach to improve
Surface Electromyography (sEMG)-based HGR accuracy via virtual Inertial
Measurement Unit (IMU) signals. Specifically, we trained a deep generative
model based on the intrinsic correlation between forearm sEMG signals and
forearm IMU signals to generate virtual forearm IMU signals from the input
forearm sEMG signals at first. Subsequently, the sEMG signals and virtual IMU
signals were fed into a multimodal Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for
gesture recognition. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we
conducted experiments on 6 databases, including 5 publicly available databases
and our collected database comprising 28 subjects performing 38 gestures,
containing both sEMG and IMU data. The results show that our proposed approach
outperforms the sEMG-based unimodal HGR method (with increases of
2.15%-13.10%). It demonstrates that incorporating virtual IMU signals,
generated by deep generative models, can significantly enhance the accuracy of
sEMG-based HGR. The proposed approach represents a successful attempt to
transition from unimodal HGR to multimodal HGR without additional sensor
hardware.

通过使用深度生成模型生成虚拟惯性测量单元信号，将 sEMG 信号和生成的虚拟 IMU 信号输入多模态卷积神经网络模型，可以显著提高基于 sEMG 的手势识别的准确性。