Employing Data Augmentation for Recognition of Hand Gestures Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Hand gestures are a form of non-verbal communication. Apart from traditional input devices, hand gestures are used for interaction with computers too. Communication via hand gestures finds many applications in the real world. Different people have hands with different shapes and orientations, which is termed as nonlinearity. The nonlinearity affects the performance of hand gesture models. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is an approach of neural networks, specifically known as deep learning. CNN is used to recognize and classify images. Sometimes, CNN could not correctly understand the hand gesture due to nonlinearity. Data augmentation helps CNN to understand the nonlinearity and complexity of images better. Data augmentation generates enormous data from lesser data, thus increasing the data adversity. Data augmentation uses various operations like zooming, rotating, shifting, shearing, and scaling to generate more data from the existing data. This article executes a CNN model using augmented data for recognition of static hand gestures. The dataset consists of 10 different hand gestures. The experimented CNN model has been trained using 10000 images and tested using 1000 images. The changes in the output of CNN with and without data augmentation have been highlighted. The CNN model employing data augmentation achieved an accuracy of 98.10%, whereas the CNN model excluding the data augmentation process attained an accuracy of 94.90% only.

This work was done as a part of M. Tech. Thesis [1] during his stay at MNNIT Allahabad as a Master’s student.