Hand gesture recognition is one of the most effective modes of interaction between humans and computers due to being highly flexible and user-friendly. A real-time hand gesture recognition system should aim to develop a user-independent interface with high recognition performance. Nowadays, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) show high recognition rates in image classification problems. Due to the unavailability of large labeled image samples in static hand gesture images, it is a challenging task to train deep CNN networks such as AlexNet, VGG-16 and ResNet from scratch. Therefore, inspired by CNN performance, an end-to-end fine-tuning method of a pre-trained CNN model with score-level fusion technique is proposed here to recognize hand gestures in a dataset with a low number of gesture images. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation (LOO CV) and regular CV tests on two benchmark datasets. A real-time American sign language (ASL) recognition system is developed and tested using the proposed technique.

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a unique representation of a person’s identity, similar to fingerprints, and its rhythm and shape are completely different from person to person. Cloning and tampering with ECG-based biometric systems are very difficult. So, ECG signals have been used successfully in a number of biometric recognition applications where security is a top priority. The major challenges in the existing literature are (i) the noise components in the signals, (ii) the inability to automatically extract the feature set, and (iii) the performance of the system. This paper suggests a beat-based template matching deep learning (DL) technique to solve problems with traditional techniques. ECG beat denoising, R-peak detection, and segmentation are done in the pre-processing stage of this proposed methodology. These noise-free ECG beats are converted into gray-scale images and applied to the proposed deep-learning technique. A customized activation function is also developed in this work for faster convergence of the deep learning network. The proposed network can extract features automatically from the input data. The network performance is tested with a publicly available ECGID biometric database, and the proposed method is compared with the existing literature. The comparison shows that the proposed modified Siamese network authenticated biometrics have an accuracy of 99.85%, a sensitivity of 99.30%, a specificity of 99.85%, and a positive predictivity of 99.76%. The experimental results show that the proposed method works better than the state-of-the-art techniques.

This paper presents a new customized hybrid approach for early detection of cardiac abnormalities using an electrocardiogram (ECG). The ECG is a bio-electrical signal that helps monitor the heart’s electrical activity. It can provide health information about the normal and abnormal physiology of the heart. Early diagnosis of cardiac abnormalities is critical for cardiac patients to avoid stroke or sudden cardiac death. The main aim of this paper is to detect crucial beats that can damage the functioning of the heart. Initially, a modified Pan–Tompkins algorithm identifies the characteristic points, followed by heartbeat segmentation. Subsequently, a different hybrid deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to experiment on standard and real-time long-term ECG databases. This work successfully classifies several cardiac beat abnormalities such as supra-ventricular ectopic beats (SVE), ventricular beats (VE), intra-ventricular conduction disturbances beats (IVCD), and normal beats (N). The obtained classification results show a better accuracy of 99.28% with an F1 score of 99.24% with the MIT–BIH database and a descent accuracy of 99.12% with the real-time acquired database.

ECG signals are carried important clinical information in the form of intervals and amplitude or morphology. Therefore, it is very important to identify these fiducial points effectively. The major limitations of the existing semi and fully-automatic ECG beat classification systems are extensive data requirements and low performance. This paper proposes a modified one-dimensional (1D) U-net architecture to find the exact locations of the important waves in the ECG signal. The proposed network utilised 1D convolutions instead of two-dimensional (2D), which is different from the traditional U-net. The encoder and decoder are the main components of the proposed 1D-U-net, where the encoder is designed to extract high-level features of the input data. The encoder contains two down-sampling stages, and the output of each stage in the encoder is sent to the corresponding decoder layer for further convolutional operations. The output of the decoder section concatenates with the respective encoder, which enables the network to perceive low-level and high-level features. The onset and offset of P, QRS, and T-waves in the ECG signal are identified using the proposed technique. The proposed method is validated on two publicly available databases, i.e. , LUDB and MIT-BIH. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art techniques.