Three-dimensional motion analysis for gesture recognition using singular value decomposition

A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Gestures are important in the communication between human and human. It will make a robot more human-friendly to enable it to communicate with human by gestures. Our research addresses to develop a method to recognize human gestures for a guide robot that can be used in hospitals, welfare facilities, and etc. In this paper, firstly, a novel 3D motion analysis algorithm for gesture recognition using singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. An experiment, in which five gestures is included, is carried out to testify the effectiveness of the algorithm. The experiment results indicate that the proposed algorithm is applicable for the guide robot to recognize human gestures in guidance.