Gestural Intent Detection and Adaptive Restoration of Degraded sEMG Signals Using Temporal Convolutional Networks and an Autoencoder

Surface electromyography (sEMG) signals acquired with low-cost sensors tend to exhibit variable degradation that can compromise the reliability of myoelectric control systems outside controlled conditions. This work presents an adaptive processing pipeline for sEMG signals composed of three chained stages: a motor-intent classifier based on dilated temporal convolutional networks, whose function is to determine whether a signal window contains muscle activity associated with a voluntary gesture; a dual-output quality assessor that estimates a continuous score and a binary acceptability label, aimed at deciding whether the signal can be used directly or requires intervention; and a convolutional autoencoder that recovers the morphology of degraded windows before they are used in prosthetic control. The decision policy for reconstruction operates on two independent thresholds and classifies each window into one of three states: signal discard, direct acceptance, or active restoration. The models within the proposed architecture are trained on the public NinaPro DB1, DB3, and DB10 datasets and validated without recalibration on signals recorded from two participants with transradial amputation over three to four weekly sessions. The results show that the pipeline correctly handles signal profiles with opposing characteristics. Inference latency remained below 5 ms at the 50th percentile across all scenarios, consistent with real-time operation. All inference was executed on a host computer; a prototype using an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi as a peripheral interface was built to display the pipeline’s decisions on physical hardware and to confirm that the serial-communication link does not introduce additional latency, not to perform on-board inference. A downstream evaluation further showed that, while restoration improved signal-level fidelity metrics, it did not translate into improved motor-intent classification accuracy relative to using the degraded signal directly, a limitation discussed explicitly in this work.