Voting-based Hand-Waving Gesture Spotting from a Low-Resolution Far-Infrared Image Sequence

We propose a temporal spotting method of a hand gesture from a low-resolution far-infrared image sequence captured by a far-infrared sensor array. The sensor array captures the spatial distribution of far-infrared intensity as a thermal image by detecting far-infrared waves emitted from heat sources. It is difficult to spot a hand gesture from a sequence of thermal images captured by the sensor due to its low-resolution, heavy noise, and varying duration of the gesture. Therefore, we introduce a voting-based approach to spot the gesture with template matching-based gesture recognition. We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed temporal spotting method in several settings.