This paper presents the design of an arm gesture recognition system using Kinect sensor. A variety of methods have been proposed for gesture recognition, ranging from the use of Dynamic Time Warping(DTW) to Hidden Markov Models(HMM). Our system learns a unique HMM corresponding to each arm gesture from a set of sequential skeleton data. Whenever the same gesture is performed, the trajectory of each joint captured by Kinect sensor may much differ from the previous, depending on the length and/or the orientation of the subject's arm. In order to obtain the robust performance independent of these conditions, the proposed system executes the feature transformation, in which the feature vectors of joint positions are transformed into those of angles between joints. To improve the computational efficiency for learning and using HMMs, our system also performs the k-means clustering to get one-dimensional integer sequences as inputs for discrete HMMs from high-dimensional real-number observation vectors. The dimension reduction and discretization can help our system use HMMs efficiently to recognize gestures in real-time environments. Finally, we demonstrate the recognition performance of our system through some experiments using two different datasets.
Heo et al. REF presented an approach based on HMM algorithm that recognizes one-arm gestures in real time environments.