Learning End-User Customized Mid-Air Hand Gestures Using a Depth Image Sensor

Interacting with computer applications using actions that are designed by end users themselves instead of pre-defined ones has advantages such as better memorability in some Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scenarios. In this paper we propose a method for allowing users to use self-defined mid-air hand gestures as commands for HCI after they provide a few training samples for each gesture in front of a depth image sensor. The gesture detection and recognition algorithm is mainly based on pattern matching using 3 separate sets of features, which carry both finger-action and hand-motion information. An experiment in which each subject designed their own set of 8 gestures, provided about 5 samples for each, and then used them to play a game is conducted all in one sitting. During the experiment a recognition rate of 66.7% is achieved with a false positive ratio of 22.2%. Further analyses on the collected dataset shows that a higher recognition rate of up to about 85% can be achieved if more wrong detections were allowed.