An Approach to Gesture Recognition with Skeletal Data Using Dynamic Time Warping and Nearest Neighbour Classifier

Gestures are natural means of communication between humans, and therefore their application would benefit to many fields where usage of typical input devices, such as keyboards or joysticks is cumbersome or unpractical (e.g., in noisy environment). Recently, together with emergence of new cameras that allow obtaining not only colour images of observed scene, but also offer the software developer rich information on the number of seen humans and, what is most interesting, 3D positions of their body parts, practical applications using body gestures have become more popular. Such information is presented in a form of skeletal data. In this paper, an approach to gesture recognition based on skeletal data using nearest neighbour classifier with dynamic time warping is presented. Since similar approaches are widely used in the literature, a few practical improvements that led to better recognition results are proposed. The approach is extensively evaluated on three publicly available gesture datasets and compared with state-of-the-art classifiers. For some gesture datasets, the proposed approach outperformed its competitors in terms of recognition rate and time of recognition.