sEMG-based technology for silent voice recognition

Silent speech recognition (SSR) is a system that implements speech communication when a sound signal is not available using surface electromyography (sEMG)-based speech recognition. Researchers have used surface electrodes to record the electrically-activated potential of human articulation muscles to recognize speech content. SSR can be used for pilot-assisted speech recognition, communication of individuals with speech impairment, private communication, and other fields. In this feasibility study, we collected sEMG data for ten single Mandarin numeric words. After reducing power frequency interference and power supply noise from the sEMG signal, short-term energy (STE) was used for voice activity detection (VAD). The power spectrum features were extracted and fed into the classifier for final identification results. We used the Hold-out method to divide the data into training and test sets on a 7-3 scale, with an average accuracy of 92.3% and a maximum of 100% using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experimental results showed that the proposed method has development potential, and is effective in identifying isolated words from the sEMG signal of the articulation muscles.