Simple But Effective: Upper-Body Geometric Features for Traffic Command Gesture Recognition

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Recognizing traffic command gestures with high accuracy and quick response at a low computational cost is a requisite for driver assistance or autonomous driving. However, it has been understudied for a long time. Existing research takes advantage of increasing development in human action recognition but pays little attention to onboard conditions. In this article, we propose a simple but effective recognition model based on human upper-body geometric features and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The handcrafted geometric features can easily be calculated with estimated 2-D human keypoints at a low computational cost but are discriminative and sufficient in classification. Offline and online inferences are implemented to comprehensively evaluate the proposed model. For the sake of robustness required in the automotive domain, dual voting is designed to filter the output in online inference. On the recently published Chinese traffic police gesture (CTPG) dataset, the presented approach is the best with a remarkable improvement of approximately 8% compared to previous LSTM-based methods with handcrafted spatial features and is competitive with advanced GCN-based deep learning methods. The tradeoff pattern is explored to demonstrate how accuracy and response time alter with different training and inference strategies so that a balanced setup can be manually chosen under various application scenarios. Field tests are also carried out with an experimental vehicle, and the results uncover the present gap between research and practical application to some extent, moving a step closer to real-life traffic command gesture recognition.