A systematic review on hand gesture recognition techniques, challenges and applications

Background With the development of today’s technology, and as humans tend to naturally use hand gestures in their communication process to clarify their intentions, hand gesture recognition is considered to be an important part of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), which gives computers the ability of capturing and interpreting hand gestures, and executing commands afterwards. The aim of this study is to perform a systematic literature review for identifying the most prominent techniques, applications and challenges in hand gesture recognition. Methodology To conduct this systematic review, we have screened 560 papers retrieved from IEEE Explore published from the year 2016 to 2018, in the searching process keywords such as “hand gesture recognition” and “hand gesture techniques” have been used. However, to focus the scope of the study 465 papers have been excluded. Only the most relevant hand gesture recognition works to the research questions, and the well-organized papers have been studied. Results The results of this paper can be summarized as the following; the surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors with wearable hand gesture devices were the most acquisition tool used in the work studied, also Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was the most applied classifier, the most popular application was using hand gestures for sign language, the dominant environmental surrounding factor that affected the accuracy was the background color, and finally the problem of overfitting in the datasets was highly experienced. Conclusions The paper will discuss the gesture acquisition methods, the feature extraction process, the classification of hand gestures, the applications that were recently proposed, the challenges that face researchers in the hand gesture recognition process, and the future of hand gesture recognition. We shall also introduce the most recent research from the year 2016 to the year 2018 in the field of hand gesture recognition for the first time.