Feature Descriptors for Depth-Based Hand Gesture Recognition

Abstract

Depth data acquired by consumer depth cameras provide a very informative description of the hand pose that can be exploited for accurate gesture recognition. A typical hand gesture recognition pipeline requires to identify the hand, extract some relevant features and exploit a suitable machine learning technique to recognize the performed gesture. This chapter deals with the recognition of static poses. It starts by describing how the hand can be extracted from the scene exploiting depth and color data. Then several different features that can be extracted from the depth data are presented. Finally, a multi-class support vector machines (SVM) classifier is applied to the presented features in order to evaluate the performance of the various descriptors.