A Multi-Scale Dual-Head YOLOv5 Framework for Hand Gesture Recognition via Spatial Relationship Modeling

Hand gesture recognition plays an important role in computer vision with broad applications in human–computer interaction, intelligent perception, and contactless interaction systems. However, existing detection-based methods mainly rely on hand appearance features, which are often insufficient for distinguishing gesture categories with similar local hand shapes but different hand–head spatial configurations. To address this issue, a multi-scale dual-head hand gesture detection framework based on YOLOv5s is proposed. The framework introduces an auxiliary detection branch to explicitly detect hand and head regions, and the corresponding multi-scale feature representations are fused to incorporate hand–head spatial contextual information into gesture recognition. Furthermore, Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) and a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) are employed to enhance multi-scale contextual representation and feature discrimination before final gesture prediction. To evaluate the proposed framework, experiments were conducted on a HaGRID-based Dataset, a UAV-Gesture Dataset, and a self-collected real-world zero-shot dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves detection performance over the YOLOv5s baseline while maintaining relatively lightweight model complexity and real-time inference capability. In addition, ablation studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed dual-head architecture, multi-scale feature fusion, SPP, and CBAM, while cross-dataset and zero-shot evaluations further demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework across different gesture datasets and unseen real-world scenarios.