3D Skeletal Joints-Based Hand Gesture Spotting and Classification

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to continuous dynamic hand gesture recognition. Our approach contains two main modules: gesture spotting and gesture classification. Firstly, the gesture spotting module pre-segments the video sequence with continuous gestures into isolated gestures. Secondly, the gesture classification module identifies the segmented gestures. In the gesture spotting module, the motion of the hand palm and fingers are fed into the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network for gesture spotting. In the gesture classification module, three residual 3D Convolution Neural Networks based on ResNet architectures (3D_ResNet) and one Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network are combined to efficiently utilize the multiple data channels such as RGB, Optical Flow, Depth, and 3D positions of key joints. The promising performance of our approach is obtained through experiments conducted on three public datasets—Chalearn LAP ConGD dataset, 20BN-Jester, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand gesture Dataset. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the Chalearn LAP ConGD dataset.

Keywords

• continuous hand gesture recognition
• gesture spotting
• gesture classification
• multi-modal features
• 3D skeletal
• CNN