Dynamic time warping for off-line recognition of a small gesture vocabulary

We focus on the visual sensory information to recognize human activity in form of hand-arm movements from a small, predefined vocabulary. We accomplish this task by means of a matching technique by determining the distance between the unknown input and a set of previously defined templates. A dynamic time warping algorithm is used to perform the time alignment and normalization by computing a temporal transformation allowing the two signals to be matched. The system is trained with finite video sequences of single gesture performances whose start and end-point are accurately known. Preliminary experiments are accomplished off-line and result in a recognition accuracy of up to 92%.