Hand Gesture Recognition from Doppler Radar Signals Using Echo State Networks
This work addresses the need for lightweight gesture recognition in resource-constrained environments like in-vehicle interfaces and robotic systems, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of high computational costs in deep learning-based hand gesture recognition from Doppler radar signals by proposing an Echo State Network approach, achieving superior performance on two datasets with 11-class and 4-class tasks while maintaining low computational cost.
Hand gesture recognition (HGR) is a fundamental technology in human computer interaction (HCI).In particular, HGR based on Doppler radar signals is suited for in-vehicle interfaces and robotic systems, necessitating lightweight and computationally efficient recognition techniques. However, conventional deep learning-based methods still suffer from high computational costs. To address this issue, we propose an Echo State Network (ESN) approach for radar-based HGR, using frequency-modulated-continuous-wave (FMCW) radar signals. Raw radar data is first converted into feature maps, such as range-time and Doppler-time maps, which are then fed into one or more recurrent neural network-based reservoirs. The obtained reservoir states are processed by readout classifiers, including ridge regression, support vector machines, and random forests. Comparative experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches on an 11-class HGR task using the Soli dataset and surpasses existing deep learning models on a 4-class HGR task using the Dop-NET dataset. The results indicate that parallel processing using multi-reservoir ESNs are effective for recognizing temporal patterns from the multiple different feature maps in the time-space and time-frequency domains. Our ESN approaches achieve high recognition performance with low computational cost in HGR, showing great potential for more advanced HCI technologies, especially in resource-constrained environments.