Enhanced multi-objective particle swarm optimisation for estimating hand postures

Multi-objective problems with conflicting objectives cannot be effectively solved by aggregation-based methods. The answer to such problems is a Pareto optimal solution set. Due to the difficulty of solving multi-objective problems using multi-objective algorithms and the lack of enough expertise, researchers in different fields tend to aggregative objectives and use single-objective algorithms. This work is a seminal attempt to propose the use of multi-objective algorithms in the field of hand posture estimation. Hand posture estimation is a key step in hand gesture recognition, which is a part of an overall attempt to make human-computer interaction more like human face-to-face communication. Hand posture estimation is first formulated as a bi-objective problem. A modified version of Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimisation (MOPSO) is then proposed to approximate the Pareto optimal font of 50 different postures. The main motivation of integrating a new operator (called Evolutionary Population Dynamics — EPD) in MOPSO is due to the nature of hand posture estimation problems in which parameters should not be tuned in a same manner since they show varied impacts on the objectives. EPD allows randomising different parameters in a solution and provides different exploratory behaviours for the parameters of an optimisation algorithm rather than each individual solution. The MOPSO algorithm is equipped with a mechanism to randomly re-initialise poor particles around the optimal solutions in the archive. The improved MOPSO is tested on ZDT and CEC2009 test functions and compared with the standard MOPSO, NSGA-II, and MOEA/D. The results show that the proposed MOPSO (MOPSO+EPD) significantly outperforms MOPSO on the majority of test functions in terms of both convergence and coverage. MOPSO+EPD also approximates well-distributed Pareto optimal fronts for most of the postures considered in this work. The post analysis of the results is conducted to understand the relationship between the parameters and objectives of this problem (design principals) for the first time in the literature as well.