Complying with the EU AI Act: Innovations in explainable and user-centric hand gesture recognition

The EU AI Act underscores the importance of transparency, user-centricity, and robustness in AI systems, particularly for high-risk applications. In response, we present advancements in XentricAI, an explainable hand gesture recognition (HGR) system designed to meet these regulatory requirements. XentricAI addresses fundamental challenges in HGR, such as the opacity of black-box models using explainable AI methods and the handling of distributional shifts in real-world data through transfer learning techniques. We extend an existing radar-based HGR dataset by adding 28,000 new gestures, with contributions from multiple users across varied locations, including 24,000 out-of-distribution gestures. Leveraging this real-world dataset, we enhance XentricAI’s capabilities by integrating a variational autoencoder module for improved gesture anomaly detection, incorporating user-specific dynamic thresholding. This integration enables the identification of 11.50% more anomalous gestures. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a 97.5% success rate in characterizing these anomalies, significantly improving system explainability. Furthermore, the implementation of transfer learning techniques has shown a substantial increase in user adaptability, with an average performance improvement of at least 15.17%. This work contributes to the development of trustworthy AI systems by providing both technical advancements and regulatory compliance, offering a commercially viable solution that aligns with the EU AI Act requirements.