A Recognition Method for Continuous Gestures with an Accelerometer

Along with the spread of smart phones and wearable devices, systems that recognizes gestures such as punch and chop using an accelerometer have recently been attracting a great deal of attention. However, these systems do not consider the situation that gestures are performed continuously from/to other gestures or untrained movements and can not recognize such gestures accurately. This paper proposes a method that recognizes gestures performed continuously without explicit intervals. The proposed method detects segments similar to template data of target gestures and chooses the most likely segment. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, an experiment is conducted with five subjects. The subjects conducted three types of gestures drawing a graphic symbol in the air; circle, triangle, and cross in five kinds of situations, and ten types of gestures drawing a numeric character in the air; zero to nine. The average F-measure of graphic symbol achieved 0.78 and the average F-measure of numerical character achieved 0.79.