SHAPE: a dataset for hand gesture recognition

Hand gestures are becoming an important part of the communication method between humans and machines in the era of fast-paced urbanization. This paper introduces a new standard dataset for hand gesture recognition, Static HAnd PosturE (SHAPE), with adequate side, variation, and practicality. Compared with the previous datasets, our dataset has more classes, subjects, or scenes than other datasets. In addition, the SHAPE dataset is also one of the first datasets to focus on Asian subjects with Asian hand gestures. The SHAPE dataset contains more than 34,000 images collected from 20 distinct subjects with different clothes and backgrounds. A recognition architecture is also presented to investigate the proposed dataset. The architecture consists of two phases that are the hand detection phase for preprocessing and the classification phase by customized state-of-the-art deep neural network models. This paper investigates not only the high accuracy, but also the lightweight hand gesture recognition models that are suitable for resource-constrained devices such as portable edge devices. The promising application of this study is to create a human–machine interface that solves the problem of insufficient space for a keyboard or a mouse in small devices. Our experiments showed that the proposed architecture could obtain high accuracy with the self-built dataset. Details of our dataset can be seen online at https://users.soict.hust.edu.vn/linhdt/dataset/. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.