A Unified Learning Approach for Hand Gesture Recognition and Fingertip Detection

In human-computer interaction or sign language interpretation, recognizing hand gestures and detecting fingertips become ubiquitous in computer vision research. In this paper, a unified approach of convolutional neural network for both hand gesture recognition and fingertip detection is introduced. The proposed algorithm uses a single network to predict the probabilities of finger class and positions of fingertips in one forward propagation of the network. Instead of directly regressing the positions of fingertips from the fully connected layer, the ensemble of the position of fingertips is regressed from the fully convolutional network. Subsequently, the ensemble average is taken to regress the final position of fingertips. Since the whole pipeline uses a single network, it is significantly fast in computation. The proposed method results in remarkably less pixel error as compared to that in the direct regression approach and it outperforms the existing fingertip detection approaches including the Heatmap-based framework.