Multi-objective optimization for hand posture recognition

Abstract

Hand gestures are an intuitive way for humans to interact with computers. They are becoming increasingly popular in several applications, such as smart houses, games, vehicle infotainment systems, kitchens and operating theaters. An effective human–computer interaction system should aim at both good recognition accuracy and speed. This paper proposes a new approach for static hand gesture recognition. A benchmark database with 36 gestures is used, containing variations in scale, illumination and rotation. Several common image descriptors, such as Fourier, Zernike moments, pseudo-Zernike moments, Hu moments, complex moments and Gabor features are comprehensively compared in terms of their respective accuracy and speed. Gesture recognition is undertaken by a multilayer perceptron which has a flexible structure and fast recognition. In order to achieve improved accuracy and minimize computational cost, both the feature vector and the neural network are tuned by a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art methods. A real-time gesture recognition system based on the proposed descriptor is constructed and evaluated. Experimental results show a good recognition rate, using a descriptor with low computational cost and reduced size.