Hand Gesture Classification Based on Forearm Ultrasound Video Snippets Using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Ultrasound based hand movement estimation is a crucial area of research with applications in human-machine interaction. Forearm ultrasound offers detailed information about muscle morphology changes during hand movement which can be used to estimate hand gestures. Previous work has focused on analyzing 2-Dimensional (2D) ultrasound image frames using techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, such 2D techniques do not capture temporal features from segments of ultrasound data corresponding to continuous hand movements. This study uses 3D CNN based techniques to capture spatio-temporal patterns within ultrasound video segments for gesture recognition. We compared the performance of a 2D convolution-based network with (2+1)D convolution-based, 3D convolution-based, and our proposed network. Our methodology enhanced the gesture classification accuracy to 98.8 +/- 0.9%, from 96.5 +/- 2.3% compared to a network trained with 2D convolution layers. These results demonstrate the advantages of using ultrasound video snippets for improving hand gesture classification performance.