Gesture recognition of radar micro doppler signatures using separable convolutional neural networks

Abstract Gesture Recognition which is an inevitable part of human computer interaction is an ever evolving active research area. This has been in use under varied applications like smart home systems, sign language recognition, augment reality and in device controls. The acquisition of hand gestures are usually through optical sensors, in this work a radar based hand gesture data set is used for classifying the gestures. Micro doppler signatures were used as the input to the model. Radar dataset has fewer data samples compared to optical based data sets. The proposed work uses separable convolutional neural networks model which does depth wise convolution followed by point wise convolution to reduce overfitting effect of the training data. The proposed model was built in such a way that the model is capable of classifying any unseen data without exactly mimicking the training samples. The proposed model has achieved 94.56% as the testing accuracy which is certainly better than the previous work on this Dop Net data set. Moreover the model has also minimized the computational hours of the model using separable convolutions.