A New Deep Anomaly Detection-Based Method for User Authentication Using Multichannel Surface EMG Signals of Hand Gestures

User authentication plays an important role in securing systems and devices by preventing unauthorized accesses. Although surface electromyogram (sEMG) has been widely applied for human machine interface (HMI) applications, it has only seen a very limited use for user authentication. In this article, we investigate the use of multichannel sEMG signals of hand gestures for user authentication. We propose a new deep anomaly detection-based user authentication method which employs sEMG images generated from multichannel sEMG signals. The deep anomaly detection model classifies the user performing the hand gesture as client or imposter by using sEMG images as the input. Different sEMG image generation methods are studied in this article. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated with a high density sEMG (HD-sEMG) dataset and a sparse density sEMG (SD-sEMG) dataset under three authentication test scenarios. Among the sEMG image generation methods, root mean square (rms) map achieves significantly better performance than others. The proposed method with rms map also greatly outperforms the reference method, especially when using SD-sEMG signals. The results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method with rms map for user authentication.