Human gesture recognition system for TV viewing using time-of-flight camera

We developed a new device-free user interface for TV viewing that uses a human gesture recognition technique. Although many motion recognition technologies have been reported, no man–machine interface that recognizes a large enough variety of gestures has been developed. The difficulty was the lack of spatial information that could be acquired from normal video sequences. We overcame the difficulty by using a time-of-flight camera and novel action recognition techniques. The main functions of this system are gesture recognition and posture measurement. The former is performed using the bag-of-features approach, which uses key-point trajectories as features. The use of 4-D spatiotemporal trajectory features is the main technical contribution of the proposed system. The latter is obtained through face detection and object tracking technology. The interface is useful because it does not require any contact-type devices. Several experiments proved the effectiveness of our proposed method and the usefulness of the system.