A light-weight real-time applicable hand gesture recognition system for automotive applications

We present a novel approach for improved hand-gesture recognition by a single time-of-flight(ToF) sensor in an automotive environment. As the sensor´s lateral resolution is comparatively low, we employ a learning approach comprising multiple processing steps, including PCA-based cropping, the computation of robust point cloud descriptors and training of a Multilayer perceptron (MLP) on a large database of samples. A sophisticated temporal fusion technique boosts the overall robustness of recognition by taking into account data coming from previous classification steps. Overall results are very satisfactory when evaluated on a large benchmark set of ten different hand poses, especially when it comes to generalization on previously unknown persons.