An Efficient and Robust Hand Gesture Recognition System of Sign Language Employing Finetuned Inception-V3 and Efficientnet-B0 Network

Abstract

Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) is a promising research area with an extensive range of applications, such as surgery, video game techniques, and sign language translation, where sign language is a complicated structured form of hand gestures. The fundamental building blocks of structured expressions in sign language are the arrangement of the fingers, the orientation of the hand, and the hand’s position concerning the body. The importance of HGR has increased due to the increasing number of touchless applications and the rapid growth of the hearing-impaired population. Therefore, real-time HGR is one of the most effective interaction methods between computers and humans. Developing a user-free interface with good recognition performance should be the goal of real-time HGR systems. Nowadays, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) shows great recognition rates for different image-level classification tasks. It is challenging to train deep CNN networks like VGG-16, VGG-19, Inception-v3, and Efficientnet-B0 from scratch because only some significant labeled image datasets are available for static hand gesture images. However, an efficient and robust hand gesture recognition system of sign language employing finetuned Inception-v3 and Efficientnet-Bo network is proposed to identify hand gestures using a comparative small HGR dataset. Experiments show that Inception-v3 achieved 90% accuracy and 0.93% precision, 0.91% recall, and 0.90% f1-score, respectively, while EfficientNet-B0 achieved 99% accuracy and 0.98%, 0.97%, 0.98%, precision, recall, and f1-score respectively.