Hand posture recognition using K-NN and Support Vector Machine classifiers evaluated on our proposed HandReader dataset

In this paper, we propose a real-time vision-based hand posture recognition approach, based on appearance-based features of the hand poses. Our approach has three main steps: Preprocessing, Feature Extraction and Posture Recognition. Additionally, a new hand posture dataset called HandReader is created and introduced. HandReader is a dataset of 500 images of 10 different hand postures which are 10 non-motion-based American Sign Language alphabets with dark backgrounds. The dataset is gathered by capturing images of 50 male and female individuals performing these 10 hand postures in front of a common camera. 20% of the HandReader images are used for the training purpose and the remaining 80% are used to test the proposed methodology. All the images are normalized after applying the preprocessing step. The normalized images are then converted to feature vectors in the Feature Extraction step. In order to train the system, k-NN classifier and SVM classifiers with linear and RBF kernel have been employed and results were compared. These approaches were used to classify hand posture images into 10 different posture classes. The SVM classifier with linear kernel performed better with the highest true detection rate (96%) among other proposed techniques.