Resonate-and-Fire Spiking Neurons for Target Detection and Hand Gesture Recognition: A Hybrid Approach

Hand gesture recognition using radar often relies on computationally expensive fast Fourier transforms. This paper proposes an alternative approach that bypasses fast Fourier transforms using resonate-and-fire neurons. These neurons directly detect the hand in the time-domain signal, eliminating the need for fast Fourier transforms to retrieve range information. Following detection, a simple Goertzel algorithm is employed to extract five key features, eliminating the need for a second fast Fourier transform. These features are then fed into a recurrent neural network, achieving an accuracy of 98.21% for classifying five gestures. The proposed approach demonstrates competitive performance with reduced complexity compared to traditional methods

Light-weight Gesture Sensing Using FMCW Radar Time Series Data

The paper proposes a novel feature extraction approach for FMCW radar systems in the field of short-range gesture sensing. A light-weight processing is proposed which reduces a series of 3D radar data cubes to four 1D time signals containing information about range, azimuth angle, elevation angle and magnitude. The processing is entirely performed in the time domain without using any Fourier transformation and enables the training of a deep neural network directly on the raw time domain data. It is shown experimentally on real world data, that the proposed processing retains the same expressive power as conventional radar processing to range-, Doppler- and angle-spectrograms. Further, the computational complexity is significantly reduced which makes it perfectly suitable for embedded devices. The system is able to recognize ten different gestures with an accuracy of about 95% and is running in real time on a Raspberry Pi 3 B. The delay between end of gesture and prediction is only 150 ms.