A recurrent neural network based Schaeffer gesture recognition system

Schaeffer language is considered an effective method to help autistic children overcome communicative disorders. Speech and language therapy results in an improvement in communication skills and understanding of language productions. In this work, a Schaeffer language recognition system is presented with the purpose of teaching children with autism disorder the correct way to communicate using gestures in combination with speech reproduction. The purpose is to accelerate the learning process and increase children interest using a technological approach. A Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model has been implemented for this purpose reporting a 93.13% classification success rate over a subset of 25 Schaeffer gestures. A comparison with vanilla RNNs and GRU-based models has been also carried out. Pose-based features such as angles and euclidean distances have been extracted from our gesture dataset by processing raw skeletal data from a Kinect v2 sensor.