The effect of electrode arrangement on spectral distance measures for discrimination of EMG signals

The proper electrode placement in applying cepstral coefficients for electromyogram (EMG) signature discrimination was investigated. The authors measured EMG signals of different motions with two electrode arrangements simultaneously. Electrode pairs were located separately on dominant muscles (S-type arrangement) and closely in the region between muscles (C-type arrangement). The application of the cepstral method to signals derived from a C-type arrangement did not achieve the same discrimination as with a S-type arrangement. The authors used a simplified model to elucidate the poor performance in C-type signals. The bandwidth of signals obtained from S-type placement is wider than that from C-type. Narrower bandwidth decreases the importance of the more discriminative parts for both autoregressive (AR) and cepstral methods. The cepstral method is more sensitive to such variation, so the degradation in performance is more serious for the cepstral method. Second, the amplitude of C-type signal is lower than the S-type; therefore, the C-type signal is more sensitive to the disturbance of noise, especially in the high-frequency band. As high-frequency noise increases, the spectral difference between different EMG signals is gradually dominated by the low-frequency part, which is more informative. Thus, the performances of both methods are improved with increasing high-frequency noise. The improving rate of the AR method is faster than the cepstral method; therefore, its discriminative efficiency may exceed the cepstral method with C-type arrangement.