Based on surface electromyography (sEMG), a novel recognition method to distinguish six types of human primary taste sensations was developed, and the recognition accuracy was 74.46%. The sEMG signals were acquired under the stimuli of no taste substance, distilled vinegar, white granulated sugar, instant coffee powder, refined salt, and Ajinomoto. Then, signals were preprocessed with the following steps: sample augments, removal of trend items, high-pass filter, and adaptive power frequency notch. Signals were classified with random forest and the classifier gave a five-fold cross-validation accuracy of 74.46%, which manifested the feasibility of the recognition task. To further improve the model performance, we explored the impact of feature dimension, electrode distribution, and subject diversity. Accordingly, we provided an optimized feature combination that reduced the number of feature types from 21 to 4, a preferable selection of electrode positions that reduced the number of channels from 6 to 4, and an analysis of the relation between subject diversity and model performance. This study provides guidance for further research on taste sensation recognition with sEMG.
Keywords: brain-computer interface (BCI); primary tastes; random forest; surface electromyography (sEMG); taste sensation recognition.