Abstract
Recent research on hand detection and gesture recognition has attracted increasing interest due to its broad range of potential applications, such as human-computer interaction, sign language recognition, hand action analysis, driver hand behavior monitoring, and virtual reality. In recent years, several approaches have been proposed with the aim of developing a robust algorithm which functions in complex and cluttered environments. Although several researchers have addressed this challenging problem, a robust system is still elusive. Therefore, we propose a deep learning-based architecture to jointly detect and classify hand gestures. In the proposed architecture, the whole image is passed through a one-stage dense object detector to extract hand regions, which, in turn, pass through a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) for hand gesture recognition. To evaluate our approach, we conducted extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets for hand detection, including the Oxford, 5-signers, EgoHands, and Indian classical dance (ICD) datasets, along with two hand gesture datasets with different gesture vocabularies for hand gesture recognition, namely, the LaRED and TinyHands datasets. Here, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture is efficient and robust. In addition, it outperforms other approaches in both the hand detection and gesture classification tasks.
Highlights
Among the several human-computer research activities in computer vision and machine learning, hand gesture recognition is important due to its various potential applications
Robust hand gesture detection and recognition in cluttered environments is a crucial task for many computer vision applications, such as human-computer interaction, sign language recognition, hand action analysis, driver hand behavior monitoring, and virtual reality
The proposed architecture is based on a one-stage dense object detector for hand detection and a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) network for gesture classification
Summary
Among the several human-computer research activities in computer vision and machine learning (e.g., human action recognition, pose estimation, and gesture recognition), hand gesture recognition is important due to its various potential applications. Robust hand gesture detection and recognition in cluttered environments is a crucial task for many computer vision applications, such as human-computer interaction, sign language recognition, hand action analysis, driver hand behavior monitoring, and virtual reality. This task presents a challenging problem that has not yet been solved in computer vision and machine learning. Unlike many previous studies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], which separately have tried to address hand detection or hand gesture recognition, our approach attempts to jointly solve the problem of hand localization and gesture recognition This task, is very challenging, due to the significant variations of hand images in realistic scenarios. Encouraged by recently emerged deep learning approaches for object detection and recognition [14,15,16], many researchers have proposed numerous approaches to Sensors 2019, 19, 5282; doi:10.3390/s19235282 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
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