Fine-Grained Radar Hand Gesture Recognition Method Based on Variable-Channel DRSN

With the ongoing miniaturization of smart devices, fine-grained hand gesture recognition using millimeter-wave radar has attracted increasing attention, yet practical deployment remains challenging in continuous-gesture segmentation, robust feature extraction, and reliable classification. This paper presents an end-to-end fine-grained gesture recognition framework based on frequency modulated continuous wave(FMCW) millimeter-wave radar, including gesture design, data acquisition, feature construction, and neural network-based classification. Ten gesture types are recorded (eight valid gestures and two return-to-neutral gestures); for classification, the two return-to-neutral gesture types are merged into a single invalid class, yielding a nine-class task. A sliding-window segmentation method is developed using short-time Fourier transformation(STFT)-based Doppler-time representations, and a dataset of 4050 labeled samples is collected. Multiple signal classification(MUSIC)-based super-resolution estimation is adopted to construct range–time and angle–time representations, and instance-wise normalization is applied to Doppler and range features to mitigate inter-individual variability without test leakage. For recognition, a variable-channel deep residual shrinkage network (DRSN) is employed to improve robustness to noise, supporting single-, dual-, and triple-channel feature inputs. Results under both subject-dependent evaluation with repeated random splits and subject-independent leave one subject out(LOSO) cross-validation show that DRSN architecture consistently outperforms the RefineNet-based baseline, and the triple-channel configuration achieves the best performance (98.88% accuracy). Overall, the variable-channel design enables flexible feature selection to meet diverse application requirements.