Real-Time Macro Gesture Recognition Using Efficient Empirical Feature Extraction With Millimeter-Wave Technology

Human Machine Interaction based on air gestures finds an increasing number of applications in consumer electronics. The availability of mmWave technology, combined with machine learning, allows the detection and classification of gestures, avoiding high-resolution LIDAR or video sensors. Nevertheless, in most of the existing studies, the processing takes place offline, takes into account only the velocity and distance of the moving arm, and can handle only gestures that are conducted very close to the sensor device, which limits the range of possible applications. Here, we use an experimental multi-channel mmWave-based system that can detect small targets, like a moving arm, up to a few meters away from the sensor. As our pipeline can estimate and take into account the angle of arrival in azimuth and elevation, it has the ability to classify a greater variety of dynamic gestures. Furthermore, the digital signal processing chain we present here, runs in real-time, incorporating an event detector. Whenever an event is detected, a novel empirical feature extraction takes place and a Multi-Layer Perceptron is deployed to infer the type of the gesture. To evaluate our setup and signal processing pipeline, a dataset with ten subjects, performing nine gestures was recorded. Our method yielded 94.3% accuracy on the test set, indicating a successful combination of our proposed sensor and signal processing pipeline for real time applications.