A Hierarchical Model for Continuous Gesture Recognition Using Kinect

. Human gesture recognition is an area, which has been studied thoroughly in recent years, and close to 100% recognition rates in restricted environments have been achieved, often either with single separated gestures in the input stream, or with computationally intensive systems. The results are unfortunately not as strik- ing, when it comes to a continuous stream of gestures. In this paper we introduce a hierarchical system for gesture recognition for use in a gaming setting, with a continuous stream of data. Layer 1 is based on Nearest Neighbor Search and layer 2 uses Hidden Markov Models. The system uses features that are computed from Microsoft Kinect skeletons. We propose a new set of features, the relative angles of the limbs from Kinect’s axes to use in NNS. The new features show a 10 percent point increase in precision when compared with features from previously published results. We also propose a way of attributing recognised gestures with a force at- tribute, for use in gaming. The recognition rate in layer 1 is 68.2%, with an even higher rate for simple gestures. Layer 2 reduces the noise and has a average recog- nition rate of 85.1%. When some simple constraints are added we reach a precision of 90.5% with a recall of 91.4%.