  In this paper, a real-time signal processing frame-work based on a 60 GHz
frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system to recognize gestures
is proposed. In order to improve the robustness of the radar-based gesture
recognition system, the proposed framework extracts a comprehensive hand
profile, including range, Doppler, azimuth and elevation, over multiple
measurement-cycles and encodes them into a feature cube. Rather than feeding
the range-Doppler spectrum sequence into a deep convolutional neural network
(CNN) connected with recurrent neural networks, the proposed framework takes
the aforementioned feature cube as input of a shallow CNN for gesture
recognition to reduce the computational complexity. In addition, we develop a
hand activity detection (HAD) algorithm to automatize the detection of gestures
in real-time case. The proposed HAD can capture the time-stamp at which a
gesture finishes and feeds the hand profile of all the relevant
measurement-cycles before this time-stamp into the CNN with low latency. Since
the proposed framework is able to detect and classify gestures at limited
computational cost, it could be deployed in an edge-computing platform for
real-time applications, whose performance is notedly inferior to a
state-of-the-art personal computer. The experimental results show that the
proposed framework has the capability of classifying 12 gestures in real-time
with a high F1-score.
