Point Cloud Deep Learning Solution for Hand Gesture Recognition

In the last couple of years, there has been an increasing need for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems that do not require touching the devices to control them, such as ATMs, self service kiosks in airports, terminals in public offices, among others. The use of hand gestures offers a natural alternative to achieve control without touching the devices. This paper presents a solution that allows the recognition of hand gestures by analyzing three-dimensional landmarks using deep learning. These landmarks are extracted by using a model created with machine learning techniques from a single standard RGB camera in order to define the skeleton of the hand with 21 landmarks distributed as follows: one on the wrist and four on each finger. This study proposes a deep neural network that was trained with 9 gestures receiving as input the 21 points of the hand. One of the main contributions, that considerably improves the performance, is a first layer of normalization and transformation of the landmarks. In our experimental analysis, we reach an accuracy of 99.87% recognizing of 9 hand gestures.