Approximation of Curvature and Velocity for Gesture Segmentation and Synthesis

International audienceThis paper describes a new approach to analyze hand gestures, based on an experimental approximation of the shape and kinematics of compressed arm trajectories. The motivation of such a model is on the one hand the reduction of the gesture data, and on the other hand the possibility to segment gestures into meaningful units, yielding to an analysis tool for gesture coding and synthesis. We show that the measures of the inverse of the distance between adaptive samples and velocity estimated at these points are respectively correlated to the instantaneous curvature and tangential velocity directly computed on motion capture data. Based on these correlation results, we propose a new way to automatically segment hand gestures. We show also that this approach can be applied to a global analysis / synthesis framework, useful for automatic animation of virtual characters performing sign langue gestures