Hand gesture detection with convolutional neural networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method for locating and recognizing hand gestures from images, based on Deep Learning. Our goal is to provide an intuitive and accessible way to interact with Computer Vision-based mobile applications aimed to assist visually impaired people (e.g. pointing a finger at an object in a real scene to zoom in for a close-up of the pointed object). Initially, we have defined different hand gestures that can be assigned to different actions. After that, we have created a database containing images corresponding to these gestures. Lastly, this database has been used to train Neural Networks with different topologies (testing different input sizes, weight initialization, and data augmentation process). In our experiments, we have obtained high accuracies both in localization (96%–100%) and in recognition (99.45%) with Networks that are appropriate to be ported to mobile devices.