Recognizing Hand Gestures Using Motion Trajectories

We present an algorithm for extracting and classifying two-dimensional motion in an image sequence based on motion trajectories. First, a multiscale segmentation is performed to generate homogeneous regions in each frame. Regions between consecutive frames are then matched to obtain 2-view correspondences. Affine transformations are computed from each pair of corresponding regions to define pixel matches. Pixels matches over consecutive images pairs are concatenated to obtain pixel-level motion trajectories across the image sequence. Motion patterns are learned from the extracted trajectories using a time-delay neural network. We apply the proposed method to recognize 40 hand gestures of American Sign Language. Experimental results show that motion patterns in hand gestures can be extracted and recognized with high recognition rate using motion trajectories.