Novel Hand Gesture Alert System

Sexual assault can cause great societal damage, with negative socio-economic, mental, sexual, physical and reproductive consequences. According to the Eurostat, the number of crimes increased in the European Union between 2008 and 2016. However, despite the increase in security tools such as cameras, it is usually difficult to know if an individual is subject to an assault based on his or her posture. Hand gestures are seen by many as the natural means of nonverbal communication when interacting with a computer, and a considerable amount of research has been performed. In addition, the identifiable hand placement characteristics provided by modern inexpensive commercial depth cameras can be used in a variety of gesture recognition-based systems, particularly for human-machine interactions. This paper introduces a novel gesture alert system that uses a combination of Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs). The overall system can be subdivided into three main parts: firstly, the human detection in the image using a pretrained You Only Look Once (YOLO) method, which extracts the related bounding boxes containing his/her hands; secondly, the gesture detection/classification stage, which processes the bounding box images; and thirdly, we introduced a module called counterGesture, which triggers the alert.