Hand Gesture Recognition Using an Infrared Proximity Sensor Array

Hand gesture is the most common tool used to interact with and control various electronic devices. In this paper, we propose a novel hand gesture recognition method using fuzzy logic based classification with a new type of sensor array. In some cases, feature patterns of hand gesture signals cannot be uniquely distinguished and recognized when people perform the same gesture in different ways. Moreover, differences in the hand shape and skeletal articulation of the arm influence to the process. Manifold features were extracted, and efficient features, which make gestures distinguishable, were selected. However, there exist similar feature patterns across different hand gestures, and fuzzy logic is applied to classify them. Fuzzy rules are defined based on the many feature patterns of the input signal. An adaptive neural fuzzy inference system was used to generate fuzzy rules automatically for classifying hand gestures using low number of feature patterns as input. In addition, emotion expression was conducted after the hand gesture recognition for resultant human-robot interaction. Our proposed method was tested with many hand gesture datasets and validated with different evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that our method detects more hand gestures as compared to the other existing methods with robust hand gesture recognition and corresponding emotion expressions, in real time.