A new approach for dynamic gesture recognition using skeleton trajectory representation and histograms of cumulative magnitudes

In this paper, we present a new approach for dynamic hand gesture recognition that uses intensity, depth, and skeleton joint data captured by Kinect sensor. This method integrates global and local information of a dynamic gesture. First, we represent the skeleton 3D trajectory in spherical coordinates. Then, we select the most relevant points in the hand trajectory with our proposed method for keyframe detection. After, we represent the joint movements by spatial, temporal and hand position changes information. Next, we use the direction cosines definition to describe the body positions by generating histograms of cumulative magnitudes from the depth data which were converted in a point-cloud. We evaluate our approach with different public gesture datasets and a sign language dataset created by us. Our results outperformed state-of-the-art methods and highlight the smooth and fast processing for feature extraction being able to be implemented in real time.