An Online Approach for Gesture Recognition Toward Real-World Applications

Action recognition is an important research area in computer vision. Recently, the application of deep learning greatly promotes the development of action recognition. Many networks have achieved excellent performances on popular datasets. But there is still a gap between researches and real-world applications. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach for real-time online gesture recognition, trying to bring deep learning based action recognition methods into real-world applications. Our integrated approach mainly consists of three parts. (1) A gesture recognition network simplified from two-stream CNNs is trained on optical flow images to recognize gestures. (2) To adapt to complicated and changeable real-world environments, target detection and tracking are applied to get a stable target bounding box to eliminate environment disturbances. (3) Improved optical flow is introduced to remove global camera motion and get a better description of human motions, which improves gesture recognition performance significantly. The integrated approach is tested on real-world datasets and achieves satisfying recognition performance, while guaranteeing a real-time processing speed.