Electromyography-Based Sign Language Recognition: A Low-Channel Approach for Classifying Fruit Name Gestures

This paper presents a method for recognizing sign language gestures corresponding to fruit names using electromyography (EMG) signals. The proposed system focuses on classification using a limited number of EMG channels, aiming to reduce classification process complexity while maintaining high recognition accuracy. The dataset (DS) contains EMG signal data of 46 hearing-impaired people and descriptions of fruit names, including apple, pear, apricot, nut, cherry, and raspberry, in sign language (SL). Based on the presented DS, gesture movements were classified using five different classification algorithms—Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbors, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, and neural networks—and the algorithm that gives the best result for gesture movements was determined. The best classification result was obtained during recognition of the word cherry based on the RF algorithm, and 97% accuracy was achieved.