Deep learning based Hand gesture recognition system and design of a Human-Machine Interface

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time hand gesture recognition system using deep learning models, including CNNs and ViT, to enable human-computer interaction and control desktop applications, benefiting disabled users.

Contribution

The work introduces a real-time gesture recognition system employing pre-trained CNNs and ViT, with improved accuracy and smoothness for practical HCI applications.

Findings

Inception-V1 outperformed other models in classification accuracy.

System achieved 25 fps, suitable for real-time interaction.

Successfully controlled desktop applications with gesture commands.

Abstract

In this work, a real-time hand gesture recognition system-based human-computer interface (HCI) is presented. The system consists of six stages: (1) hand detection, (2) gesture segmentation, (3) use of five pre-trained convolutional neural network models (CNN) and vision transformer (ViT), (4) building an interactive human-machine interface (HMI), (5) development of a gesture-controlled virtual mouse, (6) use of Kalman filter to estimate the hand position, based on that the smoothness of the motion of pointer is improved. In our work, five pre-trained CNN (VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, ResNet101, and Inception-V1) models and ViT have been employed to classify hand gesture images. Two multi-class datasets (one public and one custom) have been used to validate the models. Considering the model's performances, it is observed that Inception-V1 has significantly shown a better classification performance compared to the other four CNN models and ViT in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-score values. We have also expanded this system to control some desktop applications (such as VLC player, audio player, file management, playing 2D Super-Mario-Bros game, etc.) with different customized gesture commands in real-time scenarios. The average speed of this system has reached 25 fps (frames per second), which meets the requirements for the real-time scenario. Performance of the proposed gesture control system obtained the average response time in milisecond for each control which makes it suitable for real-time. This model (prototype) will benefit physically disabled people interacting with desktops.