Few-shot prototype adaptation for generalizable electromyography gesture recognition

Abstract

Abstract We present EMG-Adapt, a novel few-shot prototype adaptation framework designed to enhance the robustness and data efficiency of electromyography (EMG)-based gesture recognition. By integrating the representational power of prototype learning with the rapid adaptation capabilities of meta-learning, our framework introduces several technical novelties. These include a cepstrum coefficient average feature extraction method that reduces sensitivity to noise and variations, a deep prototype learning method based on hybrid loss functions for both discriminative classification and embedding space structure, and a meta-learning strategy for efficient prototype update with minimal labeled examples. Our integrated approach significantly improves few-shot gesture recognition performance, requiring substantially less calibration data than conventional methods. Extensive experiments on five public EMG datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in cross-session and cross-user generalization scenarios, while maintaining computational efficiency. This work represents a significant advancement towards practical, user-friendly, and scalable EMG-based human-computer interfaces, with potential applications in prosthetics, assistive technologies, and virtual reality. Future research will explore self-supervised learning techniques and extend the framework to handle more gestures and online adaptation strategies for enhanced real-world robustness.