Authors:
            
                    Damiano Malafronte
                    
                        
                    
                     and
                
                    Nicoletta Noceti
                    
                        
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliation:
            
                    
                        
                    
                    Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            Natural User Interfaces, Gesture Recognition, Hand Pose Classification, Fingers Detection.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Applications and Services
                    ; 
                        Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
                    ; 
                        Enterprise Information Systems
                    ; 
                        Human and Computer Interaction
                    ; 
                        Human-Computer Interaction
                    ; 
                        Image and Video Analysis
                    ; 
                        Shape Representation and Matching
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                In this paper we consider the problem of recognizing dynamic human gestures in the context of human-machine interaction. We are particularly interested to the so-called Natural User Interfaces, a new modality based on a more natural and intuitive way of interacting with a digital device. In our work, a user can interact with a system by performing a set of encoded hand gestures in front of a webcam. We designed a method that first classifies hand poses guided by a finger detection procedure, and then recognizes known gestures with a syntactic approach. To this purpose, we collected a sequence of hand poses over time, to build a linguistic gesture description. The known gestures are formalized using a generative grammar. Then, at runtime, a parser allows us to perform gesture recognition leveraging on the production rules of the grammar. As for finger detection, we propose a new method which starts from a distance transform of the hand region and iteratively scans such region accordin
                g to the distance values moving from a fingertip to the hand palm. We experimentally validated our approach, showing both the hand pose classification and gesture recognition
performances.
                (More)