Surface electromyography (sEMG) signals can reflect the body motion information and are widely used in military, medical rehabilitation, industrial production. The lower limb motion classification mainly includes feature extraction and classification model establishment. Firstly, we proposed a feature extraction method based on the wavelet packet transform (WPT) and principal component analysis (PCA). We used the wavelet packet method to decompose the sEMG signals of three muscles in the lower limb and got the 24-dimensional eigenvector. To reduce the calculation and improve the speed of the classification model, we used the PCA method to reduce the dimension of the feature vector and got the 3-dimensional eigenvector. Then, we proposed a method based on the scale unscented Kalman filter (SUKF) and neural network (NN) for lower limb motion classification. Through the scale correction unscented transform (SCUT) could optimize the neural network weight and improve lower limb motion classification accuracy. Finally, the experimental results showed that the average accuracy was 93.7%. Compared with the backpropagation neural network (BPNN) and wavelet neural network (WNN), this method could improve the accuracy and reliability of the lower limb motion classification. INDEX TERMS sEMG signals, lower limb motion classification, feature extraction, wavelet packet transform, principal component analysis, unscented Kalman filter, neural networks.