STAPointGNN: Spatial-Temporal Attention Graph Neural Network for Gesture Recognition Using Millimeter-Wave Radar

Gesture recognition plays a pivotal role in enabling natural and intuitive human-computer interaction (HCI), finding applications in diverse domains such as smart homes, robot control, and virtual reality. Thanks to advances in computer vision, the most popular method currently is to use the camera for gesture recognition. However, the camera struggles to function properly in poor lighting and inclement weather, and risks invading privacy. Due to the robust and non-invasive features of millimeter-wave radar, gesture recognition based on millimeter-wave radar has received extensive attention from researchers in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel graph neural network named STAPointGNN for gesture recognition using millimeter-wave radar. In order to better extract features in the spatial and temporal dimensions of point clouds collected by millimeter-wave radar, we designed a spatial-temporal attention mechanism based on graph neural network. We also propose a novel point flow embedding method to capture the motion features of the point clouds in adjacent frames. To verify the superiority of our method, we conduct experiments on two public millimeter-wave radar gesture recognition datasets. The results show that our model outperforms existing mainstream algorithms.