Comparing random forest approaches to segmenting and classifying gestures

A complete gesture recognition system should localize and classify each gesture from a given gesture vocabulary, within a continuous video stream. In this work, we compare two approaches: a method that performs the tasks of temporal segmentation and classification simultaneously with another that performs the tasks sequentially. The first method trains a single random forest model to recognize gestures from a given vocabulary, as presented in a training dataset of video plus 3D body joint locations, as well as out-of-vocabulary (non-gesture) instances. The second method employs a cascaded approach, training a binary random forest model to distinguish gestures from background and a multi-class random forest model to classify segmented gestures. Given a test input video stream, both frameworks are applied using sliding windows at multiple temporal scales. We evaluated our formulation in segmenting and recognizing gestures from two different benchmark datasets: the NATOPS dataset of 9600 gesture instances from a vocabulary of 24 aircraft handling signals, and the ChaLearn dataset of 7754 gesture instances from a vocabulary of 20 Italian communication gestures. The performance of our method compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods that employ Hidden Markov Models or Hidden Conditional Random Fields on the NATOPS dataset. We conclude with a discussion of the advantages of using our model for the task of gesture recognition and segmentation, and outline weaknesses which need to be addressed in the future. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.