Hand gesture recognition method based on HOG-LBP features for mobile devices

Hand Gesture recognition becomes a challenging task in computer vision field especially after the appearance of mobile devices. Although gesture recognition algorithms have been widely applied to the human-mobile interaction systems, it is difficult to meet the real time requirements and the robustness in different lightening conditions and backgrounds. This paper provides a description of a practical investigation into ways of improving hand gesture recognition algorithms for computationally limited handheld Android devices. We thoroughly researched possible approaches and find out how they affect the mobile device in terms of execution time and energy consumption. We have identified a combined HOG-LBP methodology whose performance improved upon the detection rate of other systems. In this paper, we present a static hand gesture recognition system for mobile devices by combining the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and local binary pattern (LBP) features, which can accurately detect hand poses. With the help of combining HOG and LBP features, we achieved a detection rate of approximately 92% on the enhanced NUS dataset I. This combination performs a better result than the results obtained when using only LBP or HOG features in term of recognition rate. However, in term of execution and detection time, LBP and HOG perform better than the combined HOG-LBP.