A man-machine communication system based on the visual analysis of dynamic gestures

A perceptual human-machine interface based on visual appearance of hand movements is presented. Gestures are defined as the temporal evolution of 3D poses the of user´s hand. Each gesture is described by five temporal sequences corresponding to the time evolution of the stereo depth information at the finger-tips. To this end feature processing directly exploits binocular disparity information considered in its full spatio-temporal dimension. Hidden Markov models are used to represent the statistical properties of the gesture. The high recognition rate obtained by experimental testing on a five gesture alphabet validates the approach.