A new hand gesture recognition algorithm based on joint color-depth Superpixel Earth Mover's Distance

Abstract

This paper presents a novel hand gesture recognition algorithm based on Kinect. Using the depth and skeleton from Kinect, mark-less hand extraction is achieved. The hand shapes (depth) and corresponded textures (color) are represented in the form of superpixels, which better retain the overall shapes and color of the gestures to be recognized. Based on this representation, a novel distance metric, Superpixel Earth Mover's Distance (SP-EMD), is proposed to measure the dissimilarity between the hand gestures. The effectiveness of the proposed distance metric and recognition algorithm is illustrated by experimental results and a high mean accuracy of 98.8% for hand gesture recognition is achieved based on the joint color-depth SP-EMD.