Hand Gesture Classification on Praxis Dataset: Trading Accuracy for Expense

In this paper, we investigate hand gesture classifiers that rely upon the abstracted ‘skeletal’ data recorded using the RGB-Depth sensor. We focus on ‘skeletal’ data represented by the body joint coordinates, from the Praxis dataset. The PRAXIS dataset contains recordings of patients with cortical pathologies such as Alzheimer's disease, performing a Praxis test under the direction of a clinician. In this paper, we propose hand gesture classifiers that are more effective with the PRAXIS dataset than previously proposed models. Body joint data offers a compressed form of data that can be analyzed specifically for hand gesture recognition. Using a combination of windowing techniques with deep learning architecture such as a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), we achieved an overall accuracy of 70.8% using only body joint data. In addition, we investigated a long-short-term-memory (LSTM) to extract and analyze the movement of the joints through time to recognize the hand gestures being performed and achieved a gesture recognition rate of 74.3% and 67.3% for static and dynamic gestures, respectively. The proposed approach contributed to the task of developing an automated, accurate, and inexpensive approach to diagnosing cortical pathologies for multiple healthcare applications.