Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition for IoT Devices Using FMCW mmWave Radar and Continuous Wavelet Transform

This paper presents an intelligent framework for real-time hand gesture recognition using Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) mmWave radar and deep learning. Unlike traditional radar-based recognition methods that rely on Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) signal representations and focus primarily on classifier optimization, the proposed system introduces a novel pre-processing stage based on the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT). The CWT enables the extraction of discriminative time–frequency features directly from raw radar signals, improving the interpretability and robustness of the learned representations. A lightweight convolutional neural network architecture is then designed to process the CWT maps for efficient classification on edge IoT devices. Experimental validation with data collected from 20 participants performing five standardized gestures demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves an accuracy of up to 99.87% using the Morlet wavelet, with strong generalization to unseen users (82–84% accuracy). The results confirm that the integration of CWT-based radar signal processing with deep learning forms a computationally efficient and accurate intelligent system for human–computer interaction in real-time IoT environments.