A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Techniques for Gesture Recognition using Kinect

Abstract

Progress and technological innovation achieved in recent years, particularly in the area of entertainment and games, have promoted the creation of more natural and intuitive human-computer interfaces. Forexample, natural interaction devices such as Microsoft Kinect allow users to explore a more expressive way of human-computer communication by recognizing body gestures. In this context, several SupervisedMachine Learning techniques have been proposed to recognize gestures. However, scarce research works have focused on a comparative study of the behavior of these techniques. Therefore, this chapter presentsan evaluation of 4 Machine Learning techniques by using the Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC-12) Kinect gesture dataset, which involves 30 people performing 12 different gestures. Accuracy was evaluated with different techniques obtaining correct-recognition rates close to 100% in some results. Briefly, the experiments performed in this chapter are likely to provide new insights into the application of Machine Learning technique to facilitate the task of gesture recognition.