TR-C-0159 :1996.3.15

デュック トゥリヌ, ジュリ ティヘリノ

An indirect approach to hand gesture recognition for applications combining hand gestures and natural language

Abstract:This report introduces an indirect approach to hand gesture recognition for applications combining hand gestures and natural language. In order to build an intuitive 3D GUI, we plan to use natural language. We believe that hand gestures are an important non verbal method for augmenting verbal communication, we intend to integrate a hand gesture interpretation module with a 3DGUI to resolve the inherent difficulties and ambiguities of processing natural language. This report describes a study on natural hand gestures useful for manipulating, modelling and translating 3-D virtual objects. From experimental analysis we divided these gestures in two categories. One category refers to gestures used to interact with virtual objects directly in a single mode (e.g., grabbing), while the other category usually combines information from other modes, such as natural language and can be useful for multimodal interface. Usually several getures associate with a single operative concept. Direct, template-based, approaches provide robust gesture recognition for a small set of gestures, but are not intuitive to use because gestures usually differ from person to person even for a single concept. Therefore we employed an indirect approach based a neural networks implementation that determines the position of a focal point generalized from experimental results. The focal point can be defined as the point on the hand where the attention of a person viewing the gesture is focused. We found that observation of this point gives sufficient information for interpreting some gesture's intententions.