Continuous hand gesture recognition in the learned hierarchical latent variable space

We describe a hierarchical approach for recognizing continuous hand gestures. It consists of hierarchical nonlinear dimensionality reduction based feature extraction and Hierarchical Conditional Random Field (Hierarchical CRF) based motion modeling. Articulated hands can be decomposed into several hand parts and we explore the underlying structures of articulated action spaces for both the hand and hand parts using Hierarchical Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (HGPLVM). In this hierarchical latent variable space, we propose a Hierarchical CRF, which can simultaneously capture the extrinsic class dynamics and learn the relationship between motions of hand parts and class labels, to model the hand motions. Approving recognition performance is obtained on our user-defined hand gesture dataset.