Real-time gesture recognition system and application

• Published in: Image and vision computing Vol. 20; no. 13; pp. 993 - 1007
• Main Authors: Wah Ng, Chan, Ranganath, Surendra
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.12.2002
• Subjects: Hand segmentation; Hidden Markov models; Neural networks; Real-time gesture recognition; Hand segmentation; Real-time gesture recognition; Neural networks; Hidden Markov models
• ISSN: 0262-8856; 1872-8138
• DOI: 10.1016/S0262-8856(02)00113-0

In this paper, we consider a vision-based system that can interpret a user's gestures in real time to manipulate windows and objects within a graphical user interface. A hand segmentation procedure first extracts binary hand blob(s) from each frame of the acquired image sequence. Fourier descriptors are used to represent the shape of the hand blobs, and are input to radial-basis function (RBF) network(s) for pose classification. The pose likelihood vector from the RBF network output is used as input to the gesture recognizer, along with motion information. Gesture recognition performances using hidden Markov models (HMM) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) were investigated. Test results showed that the continuous HMM yielded the best performance with gesture recognition rates of 90.2%. Experiments with combining the continuous HMMs and RNNs revealed that a linear combination of the two classifiers improved the classification results to 91.9%. The gesture recognition system was deployed in a prototype user interface application, and users who tested it found the gestures intuitive and the application easy to use. Real time processing rates of up to 22 frames per second were obtained.