Deep Learning Approach for Hand Gesture Recognition: Applications in Deaf Communication and Healthcare

Hand gestures have been used as a significant mode of communication since the advent of human civilization. By facilitating human-computer interaction (HCI), hand gesture recognition (HGRoc) technology is crucial for seamless and error-free HCI. HGRoc technology is pivotal in healthcare and communication for the deaf community. Despite significant advancements in computer vision-based gesture recognition for language understanding, two considerable challenges persist in this field: (a) limited and common gestures are considered, (b) processing multiple channels of information across a network takes huge computational time during discriminative feature extraction. Therefore, a novel hand vision-based convolutional neural network (CNN) model named (HVCNNM) offers several benefits, notably enhanced accuracy, robustness to variations, real-time performance, reduced channels, and scalability. Additionally, these models can be optimized for real-time performance, learn from large amounts of data, and are scalable to handle complex recognition tasks for efficient human-computer interaction. The proposed model was evaluated on two challenging datasets, namely the Massey University Dataset (MUD) and the American Sign Language (ASL) Alphabet Dataset (ASLAD). On the MUD and ASLAD datasets, HVCNNM achieved a score of 99.23% and 99.00%, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of CNN as a promising HGRoc approach. The findings suggest that the proposed model have potential roles in applications such as sign language recognition, human-computer interaction, and robotics.