Recognizing hand gestures using the weighted elastic graph matching (WEGM) method

•The HEGM method for classifying hand postures with a hit rate of 97.08% on average over uniform and complex backgrounds.•This method allows computing only features corresponding to highly discriminative nodes, thus decreasing computing time.•A semi-automatic technique to annotate bunch graphs is described which is efficient and leads to faster graph creation.

This paper proposes a weighted scheme for elastic graph matching hand posture recognition. Visual features scattered on the elastic graph are assigned corresponding weights according to their relative ability to discriminate between gestures. The weights' values are determined using adaptive boosting. A dictionary representing the variability of each gesture class is expressed in the form of a bunch graph. The positions of the nodes in the bunch graph are determined using three techniques: manually, semi-automatically, and automatically. Experimental results also show that the semi-automatic annotation method is efficient and accurate in terms of three performance measures; assignment cost, accuracy, and transformation error. In terms of the recognition accuracy, our results show that the hierarchical weighting on features has more significant discriminative power than the classic method (uniform weighting). The hierarchical elastic graph matching (WEGM) approach was used to classify a lexicon of ten hand postures, and it was found that the poses were recognized with a recognition accuracy of 97.08% on average. Using the weighted scheme, computing cycles can be decreased by only computing the features for those nodes whose weight is relatively high and ignoring the remaining nodes. It was found that only 30% of the nodes need to be computed to obtain a recognition accuracy of over 90%.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload high-quality image (224 K)Download as PowerPoint slide