• Siddangouda Hosamani
• Dr. Jithendra P. R. Nayak

With the development of today’s technology, and as humans tend to naturally use hand gestures in their communication process to clarify their intentions, hand gesture recognition is considered to be an important part of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), which gives computers the ability of capturing and interpreting hand gestures, and executing commands afterwards. The aim of this study is to perform a systematic literature review for identifying the most prominent techniques, applications and challenges in hand gesture recognition. To conducts a systematic review of existing literature review on hand gesture recognition, with a particular focus on existing methods that address the application of vision, sensor, and hybrid-based methods in the context of hand gesture recognition. This systematic review covers the period from 2018 to 2025, making use of prominent databases including IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science. The chosen articles were carefully examined according to predetermined criteria for inclusion and disqualification. Our main focus was on evaluating the hand gesture representation, data acquisition, and accuracy of vision, sensor, and hybrid-based methods for recognizing hand gestures. The results of this paper can be summarized as the following; the accuracy of discernment in scenarios that rely on the specific signer varies from 64% to 98%, with an average of 87.9% among the studies that were analyzed. On the other hand, in situations where the signer’s identity is not important, the accuracy of recognition ranges from 52% to 98%, with an average of 79% based on the research analyzed. The problems observed in continuous gesture identification highlight the need for more research efforts to improve the practical feasibility of vision-based gesture recognition systems. The findings also indicate that the size of the dataset continues to be a significant obstacle to hand gesture detection. Hence, this study seeks to provide a guide for future research by examining the academic motivations, challenges, and recommendations in the developing field of sign language recognition. The paper will discuss the gesture acquisition methods, the feature extraction process, the classification of hand gestures, the applications that were recently proposed, the challenges that face researchers in the hand gesture recognition process, and the future of hand gesture recognition. We shall also introduce the most recent research from the year 2016 to the year 2018 in the field of hand gesture recognition for the first time.

Sign language recognition (SLR), vision-based hand gesture, hand gesture recognition (HGR), sensor-based hand gesture, hybrid-based hand gesture, classification, feature extraction.

"A METHODOLOGICAL AND STRUCTURAL REVIEW OF HAND GESTURE RECOGNITION: AN UPDATE FROM 2018 TO 2025", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.12, Issue 7, page no.880-887, July-2025, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRGX06167.pdf

"A METHODOLOGICAL AND STRUCTURAL REVIEW OF HAND GESTURE RECOGNITION: AN UPDATE FROM 2018 TO 2025", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.12, Issue 7, page no. pp880-887, July-2025, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRGX06167.pdf