Deep learning in vision-based static hand gesture recognition

MuViH: Multi-View Hand gesture dataset and recognition pipeline for human–robot interaction in a collaborative robotic finishing platform

The use of hand gestures provides a natural alternative to cumbersome interface devices for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems. However, real-time recognition of dynamic micro hand gestures from video streams is challenging for in-vehicle scenarios since (i) the gestures should be performed naturally without distracting the driver, (ii) micro hand gestures occur within very short time intervals at spatially constrained areas, (iii) the performed gesture should be recognized only once, and (iv) the entire architecture should be designed lightweight as it will be deployed to an embedded system. In this work, we propose an HCI system for dynamic recognition of driver micro hand gestures, which can have a crucial impact in automotive sector especially for safety related issues. For this purpose, we initially collected a dataset named Driver Micro Hand Gestures (DriverMHG), which consists of RGB, depth and infrared modalities. The challenges for dynamic recognition of micro hand gestures have been addressed by proposing a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture which operates online efficiently with a sliding window approach. For the CNN model, several 3-dimensional resource efficient networks are applied and their performances are analyzed. Online recognition of gestures has been performed with 3D-MobileNetV2, which provided the best offline accuracy among the applied networks with similar computational complexities. The final architecture is deployed on a driver simulator operating in real-time. We make DriverMHG dataset and our source code publicly available 1.1https://www.mmk.ei.tum.de/DriverMHG/

Human hand recognition plays an important role in a wide range of applications ranging from sign language translators, gesture recognition, augmented reality, surveillance and medical image processing to various Human Computer Interaction (HCI) domains. Human hand is a complex articulated object consisting of many connected parts and joints. Therefore, for applications that involve HCI one can find many challenges to establish a system with high detection and recognition accuracy for hand posture and/or gesture. Hand posture is defined as a static hand configuration without any movement involved. Meanwhile, hand gesture is a sequence of hand postures connected by continuous motions. During the past decades, many approaches have been presented for hand posture and/or gesture recognition. In this paper, we provide a survey on approaches which are based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) for hand posture and gesture recognition for HCI applications.

Hand gestures are a form of non-verbal communication. Apart from traditional input devices, hand gestures are used for interaction with computers too. Communication via hand gestures finds many applications in the real world. Different people have hands with different shapes and orientations, which is termed as nonlinearity. The nonlinearity affects the performance of hand gesture models. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is an approach of neural networks, specifically known as deep learning. CNN is used to recognize and classify images. Sometimes, CNN could not correctly understand the hand gesture due to nonlinearity. Data augmentation helps CNN to understand the nonlinearity and complexity of images better. Data augmentation generates enormous data from lesser data, thus increasing the data adversity. Data augmentation uses various operations like zooming, rotating, shifting, shearing, and scaling to generate more data from the existing data. This article executes a CNN model using augmented data for recognition of static hand gestures. The dataset consists of 10 different hand gestures. The experimented CNN model has been trained using 10000 images and tested using 1000 images. The changes in the output of CNN with and without data augmentation have been highlighted. The CNN model employing data augmentation achieved an accuracy of 98.10%, whereas the CNN model excluding the data augmentation process attained an accuracy of 94.90% only.

Recently, deep learning has become a promising technique for constructing gesture recognition classifiers from surface electromyography (sEMG) signals in human–computer interaction. In this paper, we propose a gesture recognition method with sEMG signals based on a deep multi-parallel convolutional neural network (CNN), which solves the problem that traditional machine learning methods may lose too much useful information during feature extraction. CNNs provide an efficient way to constrain the complexity of feedforward neural networks by weight sharing and restriction to local connections. Sophisticated feature extraction is to be avoided and hand gestures are to be classified directly. A multi-parallel and multi-convolution layer convolution structure is proposed to classify hand gestures. Experiment results show that in comparison with five traditional machine learning methods, the proposed method could achieve higher accuracy.

Hand gesture recognition is an important area of research in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The geometric attributes of the hand play an important role in hand shape reconstruction and gesture recognition. That said, fingertips are one of the important attributes for the detection of hand gestures and can provide valuable information from hand images. Many methods are available in scientific literature for fingertips detection with an open hand but very poor results are available for fingertips detection when the hand is closed. This paper presents a new method for the detection of fingertips in a closed hand using the corner detection method and an advanced edge detection algorithm. It is important to note that the skin color segmentation methodology did not work for fingertips detection in a closed hand. Thus the proposed method applied Gabor filter techniques for the detection of edges and then applied the corner detection algorithm for the detection of fingertips through the edges. To check the accuracy of the method, this method was tested on a vast number of images taken with a webcam. The method resulted in a higher accuracy rate of detections from the images. The method was further implemented on video for testing its validity on real time image capturing. These closed hand fingertips detection would help in controlling an electro-mechanical robotic hand via hand gesture in a natural way.

Any human–computer interaction application needs to be able to recognize gestures. Hand gesture detection systems that recognize gestures in real time can improve human–computer interaction by making it more intuitive and natural. Colour gloves and skin colour detection are two prominent hand segmentation and detection technologies, but each has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. For physically challenged people, gesture identification is a crucial technique of sharing information. Support vector machine algorithm with principal component analysis, hidden Markov model, superposed network with multiple restricted Boltzmann machines, growing neural gas algorithm, convolutional neural network, double channel convolutional neural network, artificial neural network, and linear support vector machine with gesture dataset matches the interaction of gestures for various postures in real time. Although this method can recognize a huge number of gestures, it does have certain downsides, such as missing movements due to the accuracy of the categorization algorithms. Furthermore, matching the vast dataset takes a longer time. The main contribution of this work lies in a conceptual framework based on the findings of a systematic literature review that provides fruitful implications based on recent research findings and insights that can be used to direct and initiate future research initiatives in the field of hand gesture recognition and artificial intelligence. As a result, a novel study based on a hybrid recurrent neural network (RNN) with chaos game optimization may reduce classification mistakes, increase stability, maximize resilience, and efficiently use the hand gestures recognition system.

Hand gesture recognition methods play an important role in human-computer interaction. Among these methods are skeleton-based recognition techniques that seem to be promising. In literature, several methods have been proposed to recognize hand gestures with skeletons. One problem with these methods is that they consider little the connectivity between the joints of a skeleton, constructing simple graphs for skeleton connectivity. Observing this, we built a new model of hand skeletons by adding three types of edges in the graph to finely describe the linkage action of joints. Then, an end-to-end deep neural network, hand gesture graph convolutional network, is presented in which the convolution is conducted only on linked skeleton joints. Since the training dataset is relatively small, this work proposes expanding the coordinate dimensionality so as to let models learn more semantic features. Furthermore, relative coordinates are employed to help hand gesture graph convolutional network learn the feature representation independent of the random starting positions of actions. The proposed method is validated on two challenging datasets, and the experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, it is relatively lightweight in practice for hand skeleton-based gesture recognition.

Considerable effort has been put toward the development of intelligent and natural interfaces between users and computer systems. In line with this endeavor, several modes of information (e.g., visual, audio, and pen) that are used either individually or in combination have been proposed. The use of gestures to convey information is an important part of human communication. Hand gesture recognition is widely used in many applications, such as in computer games, machinery control (e.g., crane), and thorough mouse replacement. Computer recognition of hand gestures may provide a natural computer interface that allows people to point at or to rotate a computer-aided design model by rotating their hands. Hand gestures can be classified into two categories: static and dynamic. The use of hand gestures as a natural interface serves as a motivating force for research on gesture taxonomy, its representations, and recognition techniques. This paper summarizes the surveys carried out in human--computer interaction (HCI) studies and focuses on different application domains that use hand gestures for efficient interaction. This exploratory survey aims to provide a progress report on static and dynamic hand gesture recognition (i.e., gesture taxonomies, representations, and recognition techniques) in HCI and to identify future directions on this topic.

Gesture Mouse is a real-time hand gesture recognition system that uses deep convolutional neural networks to mimic mouse functionalities for controlling computers. The system requires only a standard webcam, and it can detect and recognize various hand movements and gestures, such as clicking, scrolling, zooming, movements, and hovering. The aim of this project is to improve and ease the human-computer interaction, especially for users who are physically challenged or have limited mobility. The Gesture Mouse system consists of three main components: hand detection, hand landmark extraction, and gesture recognition. The hand detection component is based on the Single Shot Multi Box Detector (SSD) model, which is used to detect the hand region in each frame of the webcam stream. The hand landmark extraction component uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the 3D coordinates of 21 key hand landmarks, including fingertips, palm canter, and wrist. The gesture recognition component is based on a CNN classifier that is trained on a large dataset of hand gesture images. The system performs well in real-time and can be used to control a computer with a high degree of accuracy and reliability. The proposed system has the potential to provide a more natural and intuitive way of interacting with computers, especially for individuals with motor impairments and also in technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

Stationary hand gesture recognition can be applied in a variety of domains such as human-computer interaction (HCI), remote control, virtual reality etc. Hand gesture recognition is mainly the study of detection and recognition of various hand gestures like Sign Language hand gestures, by a computer. This work is focused on three main issues in developing a gesture recognition system. These are (i) Threshold (ii) illumination normalization (iii) user independent gesture recognition based on fusion of Moments. It is very demanding to segment hand regions from the static hand gesture color images, due to unreliable light conditions and composite background. Since skin pixels can vary with different explanation condition, to find the range of skin pixels, becomes a hard task in case of color space based skin color segmentation. These methods propose a learning algorithm based on customized clustering expanse to remove person skin color regions from the stationary hand gesture color descriptions. To improve the performance of classification, two feature synthesis strategies have been proposed in this work.

Gesture recognition is crucial for enhancing human-computer interaction and is particularly pivotal in rehabilitation contexts, aiding individuals recovering from physical impairments and significantly improving their mobility and interactive capabilities. However, current wearable hand gesture recognition approaches are often limited in detection performance, wearability, and generalization. We thus introduce EchoGest, a novel hand gesture recognition system based on soft, stretchable, transparent artificial skin with integrated ultrasonic waveguides. Our presented system is the first to use soft ultrasonic waveguides for hand gesture recognition. EcoflexTM 00-31 and EcoflexTM 00-45 Near ClearTM silicone elastomers were employed to fabricate the artificial skin and ultrasonic waveguides, while 0.1 mm diameter silver-plated copper wires connected the transducers in the waveguides to the electrical system. The wires are enclosed within an additional elastomer layer, achieving a sensing skin with a total thickness of around 500 μ m. Ten participants wore the EchoGest system and performed static hand gestures from two gesture sets: 8 daily life gestures and 10 American Sign Language (ASL) digits 0-9. Leave-One-Subject-Out Cross-Validation analysis demonstrated accuracies of 91.13% for daily life gestures and 88.5% for ASL gestures. The EchoGest system has significant potential in rehabilitation, particularly for tracking and evaluating hand mobility, which could substantially reduce the workload of therapists in both clinical and home-based settings. Integrating this technology could revolutionize hand gesture recognition applications, from real-time sign language translation to innovative rehabilitation techniques.

Recently hand gesture recognition via millimeter-wave radar has attracted a lot of research attention for human-computer interaction. Encouraged by the ability of deep learning models in successfully tackling hand gesture recognition tasks, we propose a deep neural network (DNN) model namely, Res3DTENet that aims to classify dynamic hand gestures using the radio frequency (RF) signals. We propose a scheme that improves the convolutional process of 3DCNNs with residual skip connection (Res3D) to emphasize local-global information and enriches the intra-frame spatio-temporal feature representation. A multi-head attention transformer encoder (TE) network has been trained over the spatio-temporal features to refine the inter-frame temporal dependencies of range-Doppler sequences. The experiments are carried out on the publicly available Soli hand gesture data set. Based on our extensive experiments, we show that the proposed network achieves improved gesture recognition accuracy than the state-of-the-art hand gesture recognition methods.

In this paper, we investigate the optimal structure of deep convolutional neural networks for classifying human hand gestures using Doppler radar. When hand motions are captured by Doppler radar, the unique micro-Doppler signatures can be observed in the spectrogram. If the signature is distinguishable by a classifier, then the hand gesture can be used for controlling electronics and as an input modality for a human-computer interface. To classiiy signatures in the spectrogram, we propose the use of a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) as a classifier. DCNN is a powerful classifier that extracts features as well as class boundaries through a training process. We measured seven hand gestures performed in front of Doppler radar while generating spectrograms. To identify an optimal structure, we trained several DCNNs by changing hyperparameters, such as the number of convolutional layers, the number of filters, and the filter size. The classification accuracy obtained from the optimal DCNN structure was approximately 87%.

Computer Vision and Machine Learning are two branches of Artificial Intelligence which in combination have granted computational systems the ability of artificial vision and perception. Nowadays, human-machine interaction and the analysis of human behavior can be achieved using cameras. The subject of the current thesis is the implementation of a system for automatic recognition of static hand gestures in real-time videos with cameras, using modern techniques and algorithms of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. To begin with, we make an introduction into Computer Vision and its applications and we describe the problem of hand gesture recognition. Next, we refer to the field of Machine Learning and the main categories of the problems it includes. We describe the methodology of training a model and ways to measure its performance, focusing on Classification problems. Also, we introduce Deep Learning and Artificial Neural Networks. We present the most common network architectures used nowadays and the procedure of training a Neural Network and methods for optimization. Also, we mention the use of Convolutional Neural Networks for solving Computer Vision problems and we present some of the most known algorithms used for this task. Finally, we present our implementation of the hand gesture recognition tool, using Python programming language. We apply innovative algorithms of Convolutional Neural Networks for the detection of several key points of the hand and we train a Support Vector Machine and a Feedforward Neural Network model for the classification of those points into several predetermined static gestures. The implementation is targeted for practical real-time applications, runs using the CPU of the computer and requires a common RGB camera.