Hand Gesture Recognition Using Infrared Imagery Provided by Leap Motion Controller

• Published in: Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems Vol. 10016; pp. 47 - 57
• Main Authors: Mantecón, Tomás, del-Blanco, Carlos R., Jaureguizar, Fernando, García, Narciso
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2016; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Feature extraction; Gesture recognition; Image classification; Near-infrared imaging; Random projections
• ISBN: 9783319486796; 3319486799
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-48680-2_5

Hand gestures are one of the main alternatives for Human-Computer Interaction. For this reason, a hand gesture recognition system using near-infrared imagery acquired by a Leap Motion sensor is proposed. The recognition system directly characterizes the hand gesture by computing a global image descriptor, called Depth Spatiograms of Quantized Patterns, without any hand segmentation stage. To deal with the high dimensionality of the image descriptor, a Compressive Sensing framework is applied, obtaining a manageable image feature vector that almost preserves the original information. Finally, the resulting reduced image descriptors are analyzed by a set of Support Vectors Machines to identify the performed gesture independently of the precise hand location in the image. Promising results have been achieved using a new hand-based near-infrared database.