Intelligent Hand Gesture Recognition System Using Machine Learning
Author
Ankitha Marvalli Ramesh, Ganga Basvaraj Kakamari, Gousiya Noorain, Madeeha Tazeen, Dr. Chethan Chandra S Basavaraddi
Abstract
Communication can become difficult for bedridden, elderly, or physically disabled patients who may have limited speech or mobility. This project presents an intelligent hand gesture recognition system that uses computer vision and deep learning to convert predefined hand gestures into meaningful communication messages. The system uses MediaPipe Hands to detect hand landmarks from video frames and represents each frame using normalized landmark coordinates. Temporal sequences of these features are processed using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to learn movement patterns and classify dynamic gestures. An initial development dataset containing six emergency-related gesture classes—Call, Doctor, Help, Hot, Lose, and Pain—was processed to generate 126 features per frame for a two-hand representation. The sequences were resampled to a fixed length of 70 frames and used for LSTM training and evaluation. The current model achieved 96.67% accuracy on the held-out test set of 60 sequences. A real-time webcam prototype was also implemented to display the recognized gesture, confidence, patient message, hand detection status, and system information. The current results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The present dataset is an initial development dataset rather than the final dataset, and future work will focus on a larger and more diverse dataset, additional gesture classes, and richer features.
Keywords
Hand Gesture Recognition, Indian Sign Language, MediaPipe, LSTM, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Assistive Communication.
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References
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