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Deep Learning Based Hand Gesture Recognition and UAV Flight Controls

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Abstract

Dynamic hand gesture recognition is a desired alternative means for human-computer interactions. This paper presents a hand gesture recognition system that is designed for the control of flights of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A data representation model that represents a dynamic gesture sequence by converting the 4-D spatiotemporal data to 2-D matrix and a 1-D array is introduced. To train the system to recognize designed gestures, skeleton data collected from a Leap Motion Controller are converted to two different data models. As many as 9 124 samples of the training dataset, 1 938 samples of the testing dataset are created to train and test the proposed three deep learning neural networks, which are a 2-layer fully connected neural network, a 5-layer fully connected neural network and an 8-layer convolutional neural network. The static testing results show that the 2-layer fully connected neural network achieves an average accuracy of 96.7% on scaled datasets and 12.3% on non-scaled datasets. The 5-layer fully connected neural network achieves an average accuracy of 98.0% on scaled datasets and 89.1% on non-scaled datasets. The 8-layer convolutional neural network achieves an average accuracy of 89.6% on scaled datasets and 96.9% on non-scaled datasets. Testing on a drone-kit simulator and a real drone shows that this system is feasible for drone flight controls.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ, 07764, USA

    Bin Hu & Jiacun Wang

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  1. Bin Hu
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Correspondence to Jiacun Wang.

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Recommended by Associate Editor Xian-Dong Ma

Bin Hu received the B. Sc. degree in mechanical engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China in 2000. He received the two M. Sc. degrees in software engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China in 2005 and Monmouth University, USA in 2018, respectively. From 2006 to 2016, he was an assistant professor at Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. Currently, he is an adjunct professor in Department of Computer Science at New Jersey City University, USA. He published about 10 research papers in journals and conferences.

His research interests include software engineering, robotics, and wireless networking.

Jiacun Wang received the Ph. D. degree in computer engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NUST), China in 1991. He is currently a professor of software engineering at Monmouth University, USA. From 2001 to 2004, he was a member of scientific staff with Nortel Networks in Richardson, USA. Prior to joining Nortel, he was a research associate of the School of Computer Science, Florida International University (FIU) at Miami, USA. Prior to joining FIU, he was an associate professor at NUST, China. He authored Timed Petri Nets: Theory and Application (Kluwer, 1998), Real-time Embedded Systems (Wiley, 2018) and Formal Methods in Computer Science (CRC Press, 2019), edited Handbook of Finite Stat Based Models and Applications (CRC, 2012), and published about 90 research papers in journals and conferences. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C. He has served as general chair, program chair, and special sessions chair or program committee member for many international conferences. He is a senior member of IEEE.

His research interests include software engineering, discrete event systems, formal methods, wireless networking, and real-time distributed systems.

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Hu, B., Wang, J. Deep Learning Based Hand Gesture Recognition and UAV Flight Controls. Int. J. Autom. Comput. 17, 17–29 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-019-1194-7

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