Multimed Tools Appl DOI 10.1007/s11042-017-4510-7 Rapid and efficient hand gestures recognizer based on classes discriminator wavelet networks Tahani Bouchrika 1 · Olfa Jemai 2 · Mourad Zaied 2 · Chokri Ben Amar 3 Received: 8 June 2016 / Revised: 23 October 2016 / Accepted: 14 February 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract The vision based on hand gesture recognition is one of the key challenges in behavior understanding and computer vision. It offers to machines the possibility of identi- fying, recognizing and interpreting hand gestures in the aim of controlling certain devices, to monitor certain human activities or interacting with certain human machine interfaces (HMI). This paper aims at proposing a rapid and efficient hand gestures recognizer based on classes discriminator wavelet networks. In this work two main contributions were proposed: firstly, by enhancing previous works using wavelet networks (WN) in the classification field, specifically at the learning process of the latest version of WN classifier (WNC) by creat- ing separator WNs discriminating classes (n − 1 WNs to classify n classes) as alternative of constructing a WN corresponding to each training image. This contribution, by minimiz- ing the comparison number between test images WNs and training ones, makes quicker the test phase. Secondly, a new WN architecture based on the cascade notion was proposed, in which the WN is decomposed of a set of stages. The novel architecture aims not only at making recognitions robust and quick but also at rejecting from early stages, as fast as possible, gestures that must not be taken into consideration by the system (spontaneous gestures). To test this work, both proprietary and public hand posture datasets were used.  Tahani Bouchrika tahani.bouchrika@ieee.org Olfa Jemai olfa.jemai@ieee.org Mourad Zaied mourad.zaied@ieee.org Chokri Ben Amar chokri.benamar@ieee.org 1 Faculty of Science of Gabes, University of Gabes, Gabes, Tunisia 2 National Engineering School of Gabes (ENIG), University of Gabes, Gabes, Tunisia 3 National Engineering School of Sfax (ENIS), University of Sfax, Gabes, Tunisia