Key Video Object Plane Selection by MPEG-7 Visual Shape Descriptor for Summarization and Recognition of Hand Gestures

The use of human hand as a natural interface for humancomputer interaction (HCI) serves as the motivation for research in hand gesture recognition. Vision-based hand gesture recognition involves visual analysis of hand shape, position and/or movement. Due to co-articulation that occurs during transition from one gesture to the next, problem is encountered in continuous hand gesture recognition. This may be tackled by identifying the key frames in the gesture sequence. Key frames are those that best represent the content of a video sequence in an abstracted manner. In this paper, we present an object-based scheme for key frame extraction using Angular Radial Transformation (ART) shape descriptor for gesture representation. We propose a finite state machine (FSM) in which gestures are represented and subsequently recognized by the sequence of key frames and the corresponding key frame duration. Experimental results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme for key frame extraction, subsequent gesture summarization and finally gesture recognition.