Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition Using 3DCNN and LSTM with FSM Context-Aware Model

With the recent growth of Smart TV technology, the demand for unique and beneficial applications motivates the study of a unique gesture-based system for a smart TV-like environment. Combining movie recommendation, social media platform, call a friend application, weather updates, chatting app, and tourism platform into a single system regulated by natural-like gesture controller is proposed to allow the ease of use and natural interaction. Gesture recognition problem solving was designed through 24 gestures of 13 static and 11 dynamic gestures that suit to the environment. Dataset of a sequence of RGB and depth images were collected, preprocessed, and trained in the proposed deep learning architecture. Combination of three-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN) followed by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model was used to extract the spatio-temporal features. At the end of the classification, Finite State Machine (FSM) communicates the model to control the class decision results based on application context. The result suggested the combination data of depth and RGB to hold 97.8% of accuracy rate on eight selected gestures, while the FSM has improved the recognition rate from 89% to 91% in a real-time performance

Non-contact measures to monitor hand movement of people with rheumatoid arthritis using a monocular RGB camera

Hand movements play an essential role in a person’s ability to interact with the environment. In hand biomechanics, the range of joint motion is a crucial metric to quantify changes due to degenerative pathologies, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA is a chronic condition where the immune system mistakenly attacks the joints, particularly those in the hands. Optoelectronic motion capture systems are gold-standard tools to quantify changes but are challenging to adopt outside laboratory settings. Deep learning executed on standard video data can capture RA participants in their natural environments, potentially supporting objectivity in remote consultation. The three main research aims in this thesis were 1) to assess the extent to which current deep learning architectures, which have been validated for quantifying motion of other body segments, can be applied to hand kinematics using monocular RGB cameras, 2) to localise where in videos the hand motions of interest are to be found, 3) to assess the validity of 1) and 2) to determine disease status in RA. First, hand kinematics for twelve healthy participants, captured with OpenPose were benchmarked against those captured using an optoelectronic system, showing acceptable instrument errors below 10°. Then, a gesture classifier was tested to segment video recordings of twenty-two healthy participants, achieving an accuracy of 93.5%. Finally, OpenPose and the classifier were applied to videos of RA participants performing hand exercises to determine disease status. The inferred disease activity exhibited agreement with the in-person ground truth in nine out of ten instances, outperforming virtual consultations, which agreed only six times out of ten. These results demonstrate that this approach is more effective than estimated disease activity performed by human experts during video consultations. The end goal sets the foundation for a tool that RA participants can use to observe their disease activity from their home.Open Acces