Gesture Recognition Based On Elastic Deformation Energies.pdf

Gesture Recognition Based On Elastic Deformation Energies Radu-Daniel Vatavu1,2, Laurent Grisoni1, and Stefan-Gheorghe Pentiuc2 1 Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq 59650, France 2 University Stefan cel Mare, Suceava 720229, Romania radu.vatavu@lifl.fr,laurent.grisoni@lifl.fr,pentiuc@eed.usv.ro Abstract. We present a gesture recognition method based on deformable shapes and curvature templates. Gestures are modeled using a spline rep- resentation that is enhanced with elastic properties: a gesture trajectory as a whole or any of its parts may stretch or bend. We regard such an ap- proach as well-suited for dealing with the inherent variability of human gesture execution. The results of our gesture classifier are demonstrated with a video-based acquisition approach. Key words: gesture recognition, elastic matching, deformation energies 1 Introduction Gesture has been given a lot of attention in the last decades as an effective mean for human computer interaction. The motivation is given by naturalness and efficiency: people use gestures in the real world to interact with real objects and to convey information. An interface that is based on the use of gestures may prove to be ideal comparing to other interaction techniques. That is of course if we consider an ideal gesture framework that does not importunate, distract or adds significant cognitive load [1, 2]. Successful implementation of a gesture recognition system includes selection of an appropriate technology for acquisition, defining a model for gesture rep- resentation, implementing a robust classifier and finally, giving feedback to the user. Many of the above issues have been widely discussed in the literature. Good overviews on the state of the art in gesture interaction including gesture taxonomies for HCI, existing technologies, recognition and interpretation tech- niques are given in [3–5]. A particular problem that may be identified among the ones listed above relates to