Frontiers in Neuroscience (Apr 2020)

Event-Based Gesture Recognition With Dynamic Background Suppression Using Smartphone Computational Capabilities

  • Jean-Matthieu Maro,
  • Sio-Hoi Ieng,
  • Sio-Hoi Ieng,
  • Ryad Benosman,
  • Ryad Benosman,
  • Ryad Benosman,
  • Ryad Benosman

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2020.00275
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14

Abstract

Read online

In this paper, we introduce a framework for dynamic gesture recognition with background suppression operating on the output of a moving event-based camera. The system is developed to operate in real-time using only the computational capabilities of a mobile phone. It introduces a new development around the concept of time-surfaces. It also presents a novel event-based methodology to dynamically remove backgrounds that uses the high temporal resolution properties of event-based cameras. To our knowledge, this is the first Android event-based framework for vision-based recognition of dynamic gestures running on a smartphone without off-board processing. We assess the performances by considering several scenarios in both indoors and outdoors, for static and dynamic conditions, in uncontrolled lighting conditions. We also introduce a new event-based dataset for gesture recognition with static and dynamic backgrounds (made publicly available). The set of gestures has been selected following a clinical trial to allow human-machine interaction for the visually impaired and older adults. We finally report comparisons with prior work that addressed event-based gesture recognition reporting comparable results, without the use of advanced classification techniques nor power greedy hardware.

Keywords