SHREC 2021: Track on Skeleton-based Hand Gesture Recognition in the Wild
University of Verona（维罗纳大学）；Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia（摩德纳雷焦艾米利亚大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市科学大学）
Gesture recognition is a fundamental tool to enable novel interaction paradigms in a variety of application scenarios like Mixed Reality environments, touchless public kiosks, entertainment systems, and more. Recognition of hand gestures can be nowadays performed directly from the stream of hand skeletons estimated by software provided by low-cost trackers (Ultraleap) and MR headsets (Hololens, Oculus Quest) or by video processing software modules (e.g. Google Mediapipe). Despite the recent advancements in gesture and action recognition from skeletons, it is unclear how well the current state-of-the-art techniques can perform in a real-world scenario for the recognition of a wide set of heterogeneous gestures, as many benchmarks do not test online recognition and use limited dictionaries. This motivated the proposal of the SHREC 2021: Track on Skeleton-based Hand Gesture Recognition in the Wild. For this contest, we created a novel dataset with heterogeneous gestures featuring different types and duration. These gestures have to be found inside sequences in an online recognition scenario. This paper presents the result of the contest, showing the performances of the techniques proposed by four research groups on the challenging task compared with a simple baseline method.
This paper proposes a new neural network based on SPD manifold learning for skeleton-based hand gesture recognition. Given the stream of hand's joint positions, our approach combines two aggregation processes on respectively spatial and temporal domains. The pipeline of our network architecture consists in three main stages. The first stage is based on a convolutional layer to increase the discriminative power of learned features. The second stage relies on different architectures for spatial and temporal Gaussian aggregation of joint features. The third stage learns a final SPD matrix from sk…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
HMMs are widely used in action and gesture recognition due to their implementation simplicity, low computational requirement, scalability and high parallelism. They have worth performance even with a limited training set. All these characteristics are hard to find together in other even more accurate methods. In this paper, we propose a novel double-stage classification approach, based on Multiple Stream Discrete Hidden Markov Models (MSD-HMM) and 3D skeleton joint data, able to reach high performances maintaining all advantages listed above. The approach allows both to quickly classify pre-se…
In this paper, we propose a new hand gesture recognition method based on skeletal data by learning SPD matrices with neural networks. We model the hand skeleton as a graph and introduce a neural network for SPD matrix learning, taking as input the 3D coordinates of hand joints. The proposed network is based on two newly designed layers that transform a set of SPD matrices into a SPD matrix. For gesture recognition, we train a linear SVM classifier using features extracted from our network. Experimental results on a challenging dataset (Dynamic Hand Gesture dataset from the SHREC 2017 3D Shape …
OMG-Bench: A New Challenging Benchmark for Skeleton-based Online Micro Hand Gesture Recognition
School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学系统科学与工程学院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Defense Innovation Institute, Academy of Military Sciences（军事科学院国防创新研究院）；Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center（天津人工智能创新中心）
Semnan University（塞姆南大学）；Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）
Continuous Hand Gesture Recognition (CHGR) has been extensively studied by researchers in the last few decades. Recently, one model has been presented to deal with the challenge of the boundary detection of isolated gestures in a continuous gesture video [17]. To enhance the model performance and also replace the handcrafted feature extractor in the presented model in [17], we propose a GCN model and combine it with the stacked Bi-LSTM and Attention modules to push the temporal information in the video stream. Considering the breakthroughs of GCN models for skeleton modality, we propose a two-…
Drones have become a common tool, which is utilized in many tasks such as aerial photography, surveillance, and delivery. However, operating a drone requires more and more interaction with the user. A natural and safe method for Human-Drone Interaction (HDI) is using gestures. In this paper, we introduce an HDI framework building upon skeleton-based pose estimation. Our framework provides the functionality to control the movement of the drone with simple arm gestures and to follow the user while keeping a safe distance. We also propose a monocular distance estimation method, which is entirely …
University of Verona（维罗纳大学）；Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia（摩德纳雷焦艾米利亚大学）；University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市科学大学）；Zuse Institute Berlin（柏林祖斯研究所）
This paper presents the outcomes of a contest organized to evaluate methods for the online recognition of heterogeneous gestures from sequences of 3D hand poses. The task is the detection of gestures belonging to a dictionary of 16 classes characterized by different pose and motion features. The dataset features continuous sequences of hand tracking data where the gestures are interleaved with non-significant motions. The data have been captured using the Hololens 2 finger tracking system in a realistic use-case of mixed reality interaction. The evaluation is based not only on the detection pe…
Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）；Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg（马格德堡奥托·冯·格里克大学）
Gesture recognition is essential for the interaction of autonomous vehicles with humans. While the current approaches focus on combining several modalities like image features, keypoints and bone vectors, we present neural network architecture that delivers state-of-the-art results only with body skeleton input data. We propose the spatio-temporal multilayer perceptron for gesture recognition in the context of autonomous vehicles. Given 3D body poses over time, we define temporal and spatial mixing operations to extract features in both domains. Additionally, the importance of each time step i…
Due to the advance of technologies, machines are increasingly present in people's daily lives. Thus, there has been more and more effort to develop interfaces, such as dynamic gestures, that provide an intuitive way of interaction. Currently, the most common trend is to use multimodal data, as depth and skeleton information, to enable dynamic gesture recognition. However, using only color information would be more interesting, since RGB cameras are usually available in almost every public place, and could be used for gesture recognition without the need of installing other equipment. The main …
A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition
School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology (HFUT)（合肥工业大学计算机科学与信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science, University of Auckland (UOA)（奥克兰大学计算机科学学院）
Dynamic hand gesture recognition has attracted increasing interests because of its importance for human computer interaction. In this paper, we propose a new motion feature augmented recurrent neural network for skeleton-based dynamic hand gesture recognition. Finger motion features are extracted to describe finger movements and global motion features are utilized to represent the global movement of hand skeleton. These motion features are then fed into a bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN) along with the skeleton sequence, which can augment the motion features for RNN and improve the…
Human activity and gesture recognition is an important component of rapidly growing domain of ambient intelligence, in particular in assisting living and smart homes. In this paper, we propose to combine the power of two deep learning techniques, the convolutional neural networks (CNN) and the recurrent neural networks (RNN), for automated hand gesture recognition using both depth and skeleton data. Each of these types of data can be used separately to train neural networks to recognize hand gestures. While RNN were reported previously to perform well in recognition of sequences of movement fo…
We propose a bidirectional consecutively connected two-pathway network (BCCN) for efficient gesture recognition. The BCCN consists of two pathways: (i) a keyframe pathway and (ii) a temporal-attention pathway. The keyframe pathway is configured using the skeleton-based keyframe selection module. Keyframes pass through the pathway to extract the spatial feature of itself, and the temporal-attention pathway extracts temporal semantics. Our model improved gesture recognition performance in videos and obtained better activation maps for spatial and temporal properties. Tests were performed on the …
Softbank Robotics Europe（软银机器人欧洲公司）；INSA, University of Lyon（里昂大学国立应用科学学院）
We present a multi-stage pipeline for simple gesture recognition. The novelty of our approach is the association of different technologies, resulting in the first real-time system as of now to conjointly extract skeletons and recognise gesture on a Pepper robot. For this task, Pepper has been augmented with an embedded GPU for running deep CNNs and a fish-eye camera to capture whole scene interaction. We show in this article that real-case scenarios are challenging, and the state-of-the-art approaches hardly deal with unknown human gestures. We present here a way to handle such cases.
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Previous methods for skeleton-based gesture recognition mostly arrange the skeleton sequence into a pseudo picture or spatial-temporal graph and apply deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for feature extraction. Although achieving superior results, these methods have inherent limitations in dynamically capturing local features of interactive hand parts, and the computing efficiency still remains a serious issue. In this work, the self-attention mechanism is introduced to alleviate this problem. Considering the hierarchical structure of hand joints, we pr…
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) aim at extending deep learning to arbitrary irregular domains, namely graphs. Their success is highly dependent on how the topology of input graphs is defined and most of the existing GCN architectures rely on predefined or handcrafted graph structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that learns the topology (or connectivity) of input graphs as a part of GCN design. The main contribution of our method resides in building an orthogonal connectivity basis that optimally aggregates nodes, through their neighborhood, prior to achieve convolution. Our…
University of Rennes 1（雷恩第一大学）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Gazi University（加齐大学）
Modeling and recognition of surgical activities poses an interesting research problem. Although a number of recent works studied automatic recognition of surgical activities, generalizability of these works across different tasks and different datasets remains a challenge. We introduce a modality that is robust to scene variation, and that is able to infer part information such as orientational and relative spatial relationships. The proposed modality is based on spatial temporal graph representations of surgical tools in videos, for surgical activity recognition. To explore its effectiveness,…
Nowadays, yoga has become a part of life for many people. Exercises and sports technological assistance is implemented in yoga pose identification. In this work, a self-assistance based yoga posture identification technique is developed, which helps users to perform Yoga with the correction feature in Real-time. The work also presents Yoga-hand mudra (hand gestures) identification. The YOGI dataset has been developed which include 10 Yoga postures with around 400-900 images of each pose and also contain 5 mudras for identification of mudras postures. It contains around 500 images of each mudra…
Nara Institute of Science Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所先进工业科学与技术研究院）；Kyoto University（京都大学）
Although skeleton-based action recognition has achieved great success in recent years, most of the existing methods may suffer from a large model size and slow execution speed. To alleviate this issue, we analyze skeleton sequence properties to propose a Double-feature Double-motion Network (DD-Net) for skeleton-based action recognition. By using a lightweight network structure (i.e., 0.15 million parameters), DD-Net can reach a super fast speed, as 3,500 FPS on one GPU, or, 2,000 FPS on one CPU. By employing robust features, DD-Net achieves the state-of-the-art performance on our experimental…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
We propose a Dynamic Graph-Based Spatial-Temporal Attention (DG-STA) method for hand gesture recognition. The key idea is to first construct a fully-connected graph from a hand skeleton, where the node features and edges are then automatically learned via a self-attention mechanism that performs in both spatial and temporal domains. We further propose to leverage the spatial-temporal cues of joint positions to guarantee robust recognition in challenging conditions. In addition, a novel spatial-temporal mask is applied to significantly cut down the computational cost by 99%. We carry out extens…
DiM-Gestor: Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Adaptive Layer Normalization Mamba-2
School of Media Engineering, Communication University of Zhejiang（浙江传媒学院媒体工程学院）；School of Broadcast Announcing Arts, Communication University of Zhejiang（浙江传媒学院播音主持艺术学院）；Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学人文艺术学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Changjiang Academy of Art and Design, Shantou University（汕头大学长江艺术与设计学院）
The skeleton based gesture recognition is gaining more popularity due to its wide possible applications. The key issues are how to extract discriminative features and how to design the classification model. In this paper, we first leverage a robust feature descriptor, path signature (PS), and propose three PS features to explicitly represent the spatial and temporal motion characteristics, i.e., spatial PS (S_PS), temporal PS (T_PS) and temporal spatial PS (T_S_PS). Considering the significance of fine hand movements in the gesture, we propose an "attention on hand" (AOH) principle to define j…
Centre for Mechanical Engineering, Materials and Processes, University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学机械工程、材料与过程中心）
Human gesture recognition has assumed a capital role in industrial applications, such as Human-Machine Interaction. We propose an approach for segmentation and classification of dynamic gestures based on a set of handcrafted features, which are drawn from the skeleton data provided by the Kinect sensor. The module for gesture detection relies on a feedforward neural network which performs framewise binary classification. The method for gesture recognition applies a sliding window, which extracts information from both the spatial and temporal dimensions. Then we combine windows of varying durat…
We present an on-device real-time hand gesture recognition (HGR) system, which detects a set of predefined static gestures from a single RGB camera. The system consists of two parts: a hand skeleton tracker and a gesture classifier. We use MediaPipe Hands as the basis of the hand skeleton tracker, improve the keypoint accuracy, and add the estimation of 3D keypoints in a world metric space. We create two different gesture classifiers, one based on heuristics and the other using neural networks (NN).
In human interactions, hands are a powerful way of expressing information that, in some cases, can be used as a valid substitute for voice, as it happens in Sign Language. Hand gesture recognition has always been an interesting topic in the areas of computer vision and multimedia. These gestures can be represented as sets of feature vectors that change over time. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are suited to analyse this type of sets thanks to their ability to model the long term contextual information of temporal sequences. In this paper, a RNN is trained by using as features the angles form…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Texas State University（得克萨斯州立大学）
Hand gesture-to-gesture translation in the wild is a challenging task since hand gestures can have arbitrary poses, sizes, locations and self-occlusions. Therefore, this task requires a high-level understanding of the mapping between the input source gesture and the output target gesture. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel hand Gesture Generative Adversarial Network (GestureGAN). GestureGAN consists of a single generator $G$ and a discriminator $D$, which takes as input a conditional hand image and a target hand skeleton image. GestureGAN utilizes the hand skeleton information explicit…
How do Foundation Models Compare to Skeleton-Based Approaches for Gesture Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction?
Chair for Computer Vision, RWTH Aachen University（计算机视觉教研室，亚琛RWTH大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH, Corporate Research & Bosch Center for AI（博世公司，博世企业研究院及博世人工智能中心）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
This paper contributes to the challenge of skeleton-based human action recognition in videos. The key step is to develop a generic network architecture to extract discriminative features for the spatio-temporal skeleton data. In this paper, we propose a novel module, namely Logsig-RNN, which is the combination of the log-signature layer and recurrent type neural networks (RNNs). The former one comes from the mathematically principled technology of signatures and log-signatures as representations for streamed data, which can manage high sample rate streams, non-uniform sampling and time series …
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Skeleton data, which consists of only the 2D/3D coordinates of the human joints, has been widely studied for human action recognition. Existing methods take the semantics as prior knowledge to group human joints and draw correlations according to their spatial locations, which we call the semantic perspective for skeleton modeling. In this paper, in contrast to previous approaches, we propose to model skeletons from a novel spatial perspective, from which the model takes the spatial location as prior knowledge to group human joints and mines the discriminative patterns of local areas in a hier…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Existing methods for skeleton-based action recognition mainly focus on improving the recognition accuracy, whereas the efficiency of the model is rarely considered. Recently, there are some works trying to speed up the skeleton modeling by designing light-weight modules. However, in addition to the model size, the amount of the data involved in the calculation is also an important factor for the running speed, especially for the skeleton data where most of the joints are redundant or non-informative to identify a specific skeleton. Besides, previous works usually employ one fix-sized model for…
Recent works have shown Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to be particularly effective in image-to-image translations. However, in tasks such as body pose and hand gesture translation, existing methods usually require precise annotations, e.g. key-points or skeletons, which are time-consuming to draw. In this work, we propose a novel GAN architecture that decouples the required annotations into a category label - that specifies the gesture type - and a simple-to-draw category-independent conditional map - that expresses the location, rotation and size of the hand gesture. Our architecture…
Skeleton based recognition systems are gaining popularity and machine learning models focusing on points or joints in a skeleton have proved to be computationally effective and application in many areas like Robotics. It is easy to track points and thereby preserving spatial and temporal information, which plays an important role in abstracting the required information, classification becomes an easy task. In this paper, we aim to study these points but using a cloud mechanism, where we define a cloud as collection of points. However, when we add temporal information, it may not be possible to…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Dynamic skeletal data, represented as the 2D/3D coordinates of human joints, has been widely studied for human action recognition due to its high-level semantic information and environmental robustness. However, previous methods heavily rely on designing hand-crafted traversal rules or graph topologies to draw dependencies between the joints, which are limited in performance and generalizability. In this work, we present a novel decoupled spatial-temporal attention network(DSTA-Net) for skeleton-based action recognition. It involves solely the attention blocks, allowing for modeling spatial-te…
Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院人体工程学与机器人研究所）
We use Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Fields to perform skeleton-based pointing gesture classification at each time instance of a video sequence, where we achieve a frame-wise pointing accuracy of roughly 83%. Subsequently, we determine continuous time sequences of arbitrary length that form individual pointing gestures and this way reliably detect pointing gestures at a false positive detection rate of 0.63%.
IRISA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所布列塔尼分支）；Université de Bretagne Sud（南布列塔尼大学）
In the scope of gestural action recognition, the size of the feature vector representing movements is in general quite large especially when full body movements are considered. Furthermore, this feature vector evolves during the movement performance so that a complete movement is fully represented by a matrix M of size DxT , whose element M i, j represents the value of feature i at timestamps j. Many studies have addressed dimensionality reduction considering only the size of the feature vector lying in R D to reduce both the variability of gestural sequences expressed in the reduced space, an…
A Methodological and Structural Review of Hand Gesture Recognition Across Diverse Data Modalities
The University of Aizu（会津大学）；Bangamata Sheikh Fojilatunnesa Mujib Science & Technology University（班加玛塔·谢赫·福吉拉图内萨·穆吉布科技大学）；Pabna University of Science and Technology（巴布纳科技大学）；Sheikh Hasina University（谢赫·哈西娜大学）
A car driver knows how to react on the gestures of the traffic officers. Clearly, this is not the case for the autonomous vehicle, unless it has road traffic control gesture recognition functionalities. In this work, we address the limitation of the existing autonomous driving datasets to provide learning data for traffic control gesture recognition. We introduce a dataset that is based on 3D body skeleton input to perform traffic control gesture classification on every time step. Our dataset consists of 250 sequences from several actors, ranging from 16 to 90 seconds per sequence. To evaluate…
Data-Free Class-Incremental Gesture Recognition with Prototype-Guided Pseudo Feature Replay
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Ministry of Education, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院、教育部新一代人工智能技术及其跨学科应用重点实验室）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Engineering Research Center of Blockchain Application, Supervision And Management (Southeast University), Ministry of Education, Southeast University（东南大学网络空间安全学院、教育部区块链应用监管工程研究中心（东南大学））；New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室、多模态人工智能系统全国重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Sign(ed) languages use gestures, such as hand or head movements, for communication. Sign language recognition is an assistive technology for individuals with hearing disability and its goal is to improve such individuals' life quality by facilitating their social involvement. Since sign languages are vastly varied in alphabets, as known as signs, a sign recognition software should be capable of handling eight different types of sign combinations, e.g. numbers, letters, words and sentences. Due to the intrinsic complexity and diversity of symbolic gestures, recognition algorithms need a compreh…
