Recent methods in vision-based hand gesture recognition

The goal of static hand gesture recognition is to classify the given hand gesture data represented by some features into some predefined finite number of gesture classes. The main objective of this effort is to explore the utility of two feature extraction methods, namely, hand contour and complex moments to solve the hand gesture recognition problem by identifying the primary advantages and disadvantages of each method. Artificial neural network is built for the purpose of classification by using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The proposed system presents a recognition algorithm to recognize a set of six specific static hand gestures, namely: Open, Close, Cut, Paste, Maximize, and Minimize. The hand gesture image is passed through three stages, namely, pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification. In the pre-processing stage, some operations are applied to extract the hand gesture from its background and prepare the hand gesture image for the feature extraction stage. In the first method, the hand contour is used as a feature which treats scaling and translation problems (in some cases). The complex moments algorithm is, however, used to describe the hand gesture and treat the rotation problem in addition to the scaling and translation. The back-propagation learning algorithm is employed in the multi-layer neural network classifier. The results show that hand contour method has a performance of (71.30 %) recognition, while complex moments have a better performance of (86.90 %) recognition rate. © 2016, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.