Multi-modality Gesture Detection and Recognition with Un-supervision, Randomization and Discrimination

Guang Chen, Daniel Clarke, Manuel Giuliani, Andre Gaschler, Di Wu, David Weikersdorfer, Alois Knoll

Abstract: We describe in this paper our gesture detection and recognition system for the 2014 ChaLearn Looking at People (Track 3: Gesture Recognition) organized by ChaLearn in conjunction with the ECCV 2014 conference. The competition’s task was to learn a vacabulary of 20 types of Italian gestures and detect them in sequences. Our system adopts a multi-modality approach for detecting as well as recognizing the gestures. The goal of our approach is to identify semantically meaningful contents from dense sampling spatio-temporal feature space for gesture recognition. To achieve this, we develop three concepts under the random forest framework: un-supervision; discrimination; and randomization. Un-supervision learns spatio-temporal features from two channels (grayscale and depth) of RGB-D video in an unsupervised way. Discrimination extracts the information in dense sampling spatio-temporal space effectively. Randomization explores the dense sampling spatio-temporal feature space efficiently. An evaluation of our approach shows that we achieve a mean Jaccard Index of $$0.6489$$ , and a mean average accuracy of $$90.3\,\%$$ over the test dataset.