Toward Realistic Hands Gesture Interface: Keeping it Simple for Developers and Machines

Development of a rich hand-gesture-based interface is currently a tedious process, requiring expertise in computer vision and/or machine learning. We address this problem by introducing a simple language for pose and gesture description, a set of development tools for using it, and an algorithmic pipeline that recognizes it with high accuracy. The language is based on a small set of basic propositions, obtained by applying four predicate types to the fingers and to palm center: direction, relative location, finger touching and finger folding state. This enables easy development of a gesture-based interface, using coding constructs, gesture definition files or an editing GUI. The language is recognized from 3D camera input with an algorithmic pipeline composed of multiple classification/regression stages, trained on a large annotated dataset. Our experimental results indicate that the pipeline enables successful gesture recognition with a very low computational load, thus enabling a gesture-based interface on low-end processors.