A low-power real-time hidden Markov model accelerator for gesture user interface on wearable devices

A low-power and real-time hidden Markov model (HMM) accelerator is proposed for gesture user interfaces on wearable smart devices. HMM algorithm is widely used for sequence recognitions such as speech recognition and gesture recognition due to its best-in-class recognition accuracy. However, the HMM algorithm incorporates high computational complexity and requires massive memory bandwidth for sequence matches. There have been studies on hardware acceleration of the HMM algorithm to resolve these issues, but they were focused on the speech recognition and did not incorporate the motion orientation capability required for the gesture recognition case. In this paper, we propose an HMM accelerator incorporating the motion orientation block for gesture recognitions on wearable devices. Binary search is exploited in the motion orientation to avoid the division and arctangent associated with the orientation and reduce its arithmetic complexity. In addition, gesture models are clustered in the gesture database to save the memory bandwidth by reducing memory transactions. Moreover, logarithmic arithmetic is used in Viterbi decoding in the HMM for more reduction in its complexity. Thanks to these schemes, this work achieves 25.6% power reduction compared with a plain hardware implementation of the gesture recognizing HMM.