Nearest neighbor search methods for handshape recognition

  • Authors:
  • Michalis Potamias;Vassilis Athitsos

  • Affiliations:
  • Boston University;University of Texas at Arlington

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st international conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Gestures are an important modality for human-machine communication, and robust gesture recognition can be an important component of intelligent homes and assistive environments in general. An important aspect of gestures is handshape. Handshapes can hold important information about the meaning of a gesture, for example in sign languages, or about the intent of an action, for example in manipulative gestures or in virtual reality interfaces. At the same time, recognizing handshape can be a very challenging task, because the same handshape can look very different in different images, depending on the 3D orientation of the hand and the viewpoint of the camera. In this paper we examine a database approach for handshape classification, whereby a large database of tens of thousands of images is used to represent the wide variability of handshape appearance. Efficient and accurate indexing methods are important in such a database approach, to ensure that the system can match every incoming image to the large number of database images at interactive times. In this paper we examine the use of embedding-based and hash table-based indexing methods for handshape recognition, and we experimentally compare these two approaches on the task of recognizing 20 handshapes commonly used in American Sign Language (ASL).