Classifying Hand Gestures with a View-Based Distributed Representation

We present a method for learning, tracking, and recognizing human hand gestures recorded by a conventional CCD camera without any special gloves or other sensors. A view-based representation is used to model aspects of the hand relevant to the trained gestures, and is found using an unsupervised clustering technique. We use normalized correlation networks, with dynamic time warping in the temporal domain, as a distance function for unsupervised clustering. Views are computed separably for space and time dimensions; the distributed response of the combination of these units characterizes the input data with a low dimensional representation. A supervised classification stage uses labeled outputs of the spatio-temporal units as training data. Our system can correctly classify gestures in real time with a low-cost image processing accelerator.