Recognition of Dynamic Hand Gestures from 3D Motion Data Using LSTM and CNN Architectures

Hand gestures provide a natural, non-verbal form of communication that can augment or replace other communication modalities such as speech or writing. Along with voice commands, hand gestures are becoming the primary means of interaction in games, augmented reality, and virtual reality platforms. Recognition accuracy, flexibility, and computational cost are some of the primary factors that can impact the incorporation of hand gestures in these new technologies, as well as their subsequent retrieval from multimodal corpora. In this paper, we present fast and highly accurate gesture recognition systems based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) that are trained to process input sequences of 3D hand positions and velocities acquired from infrared sensors. When evaluated on real time recognition of six types of hand gestures, the proposed architectures obtain 97% F-measure, demonstrating a significant potential for practical applications in novel human-computer interfaces.