Can You Do Real-Time Gesture Recognition with 5 Watts?

Abstract

Accurate and reliable gesture recognition is a central problem in human-computer interaction (HCI). Many applications that make use of gesture recognition call for mobile devices with reduced power consumption, weight and form factors. Recent advances in computer vision were particularly brought by deep neural networks and come at the cost of high computational complexity that hinders the employment on mobile devices. In this study, we evaluate the usability of a low-cost Raspberry Pi 4B amended by a Coral USB Accelerator, or a Neural Compute Stick 2, respectively, for low power real-time gesture recognition. To this end we evaluate the accuracy, inference time and power consumption for two different deep neural network-based recognition models and compare the results to other computer systems available as standard. Our experiments show that a combination of a Raspberry Pi 4B and Coral USB Accelerator allows for hand gesture recognition at frame rates of up to 30 frames per second at a power consumption of less than 5 Watts.