A geometric model-based approach to hand gesture recognition

Arm-and-hand tracking by technological means allows gathering data that can be elaborated for determining gesture meaning. To this aim, machine learning (ML) algorithms have been mostly investigated looking for a balance between the highest recognition rate and the lowest recognition time. However, this balance comes mainly from statistical models, which are challenging to interpret. In contrast, we present μ C¹ and μ C², two geometric model-based approaches to gesture recognition which support the visualization and geometrical interpretation of the recognition process. We compare μ C¹ and μ C² with respect to two classical ML algorithms, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) and support vector machine (SVM), and two state-of-the-art (SotA) deep learning (DL) models, bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU), on an experimental dataset of ten gesture classes from the Italian Sign Language (LIS), each repeated 100 times by five inexperienced non-native signers, and gathered with wearable technology (a sensory glove and inertial measurement units). As a result, we achieve a compromise between high recognition rates (>90%) and low recognition times (<0.1 s) that is adequate for human-computer interaction. Moreover, we elaborate on the algorithms' geometric interpretation based on geometric algebra, which supports some understanding of the recognition process.