A statistical upper body model for 3D static and dynamic gesture recognition from stereo sequences

This paper describes a hidden Markov model-based static and dynamic 3D gesture recognition system. The shape and position of the hands, segmented and tracked using a novel 3D statistical model for the upper body in stereo sequences, are used as observation vectors. The upper body model allows for accurate 3D localization of the hands in the presence of partial occlusions, self occlusions and different illumination conditions. The accuracy of our approach is reflected by the performance of our 3D gesture based editing system, that reaches 96% over 12 dynamic gestures and four static gestures.