The emerging integration of technology in daily lives has increased the need for more convenient methods for human-computer interaction (HCI). Given that the existing HCI approaches exhibit various limitations, hand gesture recognition-based HCI may serve as a more natural mode of man-machine interaction in many situations. Inspired by an inception module-based deep-learning network (GoogLeNet), this paper presents a novel hand gesture recognition technique for impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radars which demonstrates a higher gesture recognition accuracy. First, methodology to demonstrate radar signals as three-dimensional image patterns is presented and then, the inception module-based variant of GoogLeNet is used to analyze the pattern within the images for the recognition of different hand gestures. The proposed framework is exploited for eight different hand gestures with a promising classification accuracy of 95%. To verify the robustness of the proposed algorithm, multiple human subjects were involved in data acquisition.
Keywords: IR-UWB radar; deep learning; hand gesture recognition; human–computer interaction; inception module.