Real-Time Hand Grasp Recognition Using Weakly Supervised Two-Stage Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding Manipulation Actions

Understanding human hand usage is one of the richest information source to recognize human manipulation actions. Since humans use various tools during actions, grasp recognition gives important cues to figure out humans' intention and tasks. Earlier studies analyzed grasps with positions of hand joints by attaching sensors, but since these types of sensors prevent humans from naturally conducting actions, visual approaches have been focused in recent years. Convolutional neural networks require a vast annotated dataset, but, to our knowledge, no human grasping dataset includes ground truth of hand regions. In this paper, we propose a grasp recognition method only with image-level labels by the weakly supervised learning framework. In addition, we split the grasp recognition process into two stages that are hand localization and grasp classification so as to speed up. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods and can perform in real-time.