Visual understanding of dynamic hand gestures

Analysis of a dynamic hand gesture requires processing a spatio-temporal im age sequence. The actual length of the sequence varies with each instantiat ion of the gesture. The key idea behind solving the problem is to translate the richness of the human gestural communication power to a machine for a better man-machine interaction. We propose a novel vision-based system for automatic interpretation of a limited set of dynamic hand gestures. This in volves extracting the temporal signature of the hand motion from the perfor med gesture. The concept of motion energy is used to estimate the dominant motion from an image sequence. To achieve the desired result, we introduce the concept of modeling the dynamic hand gesture using a finite state machi ne. The temporal signature is subsequently analyzed by the finite state mac hine to interpret automatically the performed gesture. (C) 2000 Pattern Rec ognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.