Robust Hand Gesture Recognition Using HOG-9ULBP Features and SVM Model

Hand gesture recognition is an area of study that attempts to identify human gestures through mathematical algorithms, and can be used in several fields, such as communication between deaf-mute people, human–computer interaction, intelligent driving, and virtual reality. However, changes in scale and angle, as well as complex skin-like backgrounds, make gesture recognition quite challenging. In this paper, we propose a robust recognition approach for multi-scale as well as multi-angle hand gestures against complex backgrounds. First, hand gestures are segmented from complex backgrounds using the single Gaussian model and K-means algorithm. Then, the HOG feature and an improved 9ULBP feature are fused into the HOG-9ULBP feature, which is invariant in scale and rotation and enables accurate feature extraction. Finally, SVM is adopted to complete the hand gesture classification. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the highest accuracy of 99.01%, 97.50%, and 98.72% on the self-collected dataset, the NUS dataset, and the MU HandImages ASL dataset, respectively.