Deep Learning Based Hand Gesture Recognition and UAV Flight Controls

Dynamic hand gesture recognition is a desired alternative means for human-computer interactions. This paper presents a hand gesture recognition system that is designed for the control of flights of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A data representation model that represents a dynamic gesture sequence by converting the 4-D spatiotemporal data to 2-D matrix and a 1-D array is introduced. To train the system to recognize designed gestures, skeleton data collected from a Leap Motion Controller are converted to two different data models. As many as 9 124 samples of the training dataset, 1 938 samples of the testing dataset are created to train and test the proposed three deep learning neural networks, which are a 2-layer fully connected neural network, a 5-layer fully connected neural network and an 8-layer convolutional neural network. The static testing results show that the 2-layer fully connected neural network achieves an average accuracy of 96.7% on scaled datasets and 12.3% on non-scaled datasets. The 5-layer fully connected neural network achieves an average accuracy of 98.0% on scaled datasets and 89.1% on non-scaled datasets. The 8-layer convolutional neural network achieves an average accuracy of 89.6% on scaled datasets and 96.9% on non-scaled datasets. Testing on a drone-kit simulator and a real drone shows that this system is feasible for drone flight controls.