Sensors (Mar 2023)

Domain Adaptation with Contrastive Simultaneous Multi-Loss Training for Hand Gesture Recognition

  • Joel Baptista,
  • Vítor Santos,
  • Filipe Silva,
  • Diogo Pinho

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23063332
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 23, no. 6
p. 3332

Abstract

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Hand gesture recognition from images is a critical task with various real-world applications, particularly in the field of human–robot interaction. Industrial environments, where non-verbal communication is preferred, are significant areas of application for gesture recognition. However, these environments are often unstructured and noisy, with complex and dynamic backgrounds, making accurate hand segmentation a challenging task. Currently, most solutions employ heavy preprocessing to segment the hand, followed by the application of deep learning models to classify the gestures. To address this challenge and develop a more robust and generalizable classification model, we propose a new form of domain adaptation using multi-loss training and contrastive learning. Our approach is particularly relevant in industrial collaborative scenarios, where hand segmentation is difficult and context-dependent. In this paper, we present an innovative solution that further challenges the existing approach by testing the model on an entirely unrelated dataset with different users. We use a dataset for training and validation and demonstrate that contrastive learning techniques in simultaneous multi-loss functions provide superior performance in hand gesture recognition compared to conventional approaches in similar conditions.

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