Vision based tracking and recognition of dynamic hand gestures

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Christoph von der Malsburg for his guidance and support. He offered me the opportunity to start my research in the challenging field of computer vision and taught me to ask the question " How does the brain work? ". His passion on this topic inspired me and the present work. Further I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Andreas Wieck for his interest in being my second reviewer. Special thanks go to Dr. Rolf P. Würtz for many discussions, his advice and support during my research and the generation of this thesis. The life at the institute has been so much easier with the help of Uta Schwalm and Anke Bücher. Thank you for the administrative support. Acknowledgements are also made to Michael Neef for providing the IT infrastructure. For their patient help whenever I struggled with L A T E X or C++ problems I would like to thank Günter Westphal and Manuel Günter. I am also grateful to Marco Müller who helped me finding faces and Andreas Tewes for endless discussions on scientific or non-scientific matters. I am glad to have friends like Thorsten Prüstel and Bianca von Scheidt who accompanied and supported me from my first academic day on. My father Dietmar and my mother Margaretha, my brother Christian and his family for all the nice moments and for showing me the strength of a family. Words cannot express what you mean to me, my wife Seza and our son David.