Papers › Real-time Hand Gesture Detection and Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Real-time Hand Gesture Detection and Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks

29 Jan 2019arXiv:1901.10323archive 2025-07-28

Okan Köpüklü, Ahmet Gunduz, Neslihan Kose, Gerhard Rigoll

Real-time recognition of dynamic hand gestures from video streams is a challenging task since (i) there is no indication when a gesture starts and ends in the video, (ii) performed gestures should only be recognized once, and (iii) the entire architecture should be designed considering the memory and power budget. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a hierarchical structure enabling offline-working convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures to operate online efficiently by using sliding window approach. The proposed architecture consists of two models: (1) A detector which is a lightweight CNN architecture to detect gestures and (2) a classifier which is a deep CNN to classify the detected gestures. In order to evaluate the single-time activations of the detected gestures, we propose to use Levenshtein distance as an evaluation metric since it can measure misclassifications, multiple detections, and missing detections at the same time. We evaluate our architecture on two publicly available datasets - EgoGesture and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture Datasets - which require temporal detection and classification of the performed hand gestures. ResNeXt-101 model, which is used as a classifier, achieves the state-of-the-art offline classification accuracy of 94.04% and 83.82% for depth modality on EgoGesture and NVIDIA benchmarks, respectively. In real-time detection and classification, we obtain considerable early detections while achieving performances close to offline operation. The codes and pretrained models used in this work are publicly available.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

ahmetgunduz/Real-time-GesRec officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Blitzkrieg37/Kinesic mentioned on GitHubtf report
GibranBenitez/IPN-hand mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
LEChaney/Real-time-SSAR mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
k-muhibul/Pattern_hand-gesture mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Action RecognitionGeneral ClassificationHand Gesture RecognitionHand-Gesture Recognition

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

IPN Hand

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Hand Gesture Recognition EgoGesture ResNeXt-101 Accuracy 94.03 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationConvolutionGlobal Average PoolingGrouped ConvolutionKaiming InitializationReLUResNeXtResNeXt BlockResidual Connection

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections