A Differential Evolution Approach to Optimize Weights of Dynamic Time Warping for Multi-Sensor Based Gesture Recognition

In this research, we present a differential evolution approach to optimize the weights of dynamic time warping for multi-sensory based gesture recognition. Mainly, we aimed to develop a robust gesture recognition method that can be used in various environments. Both a wearable inertial sensor and a depth camera (Kinect Sensor) were used as heterogeneous sensors to verify and collect the data. The proposed approach was used for the calculation of optimal weight values and different characteristic features of heterogeneous sensor data, while having different effects during gesture recognition. In this research, we studied 27 different actions to analyze the data. As finding the optimal value of the data from numerous sensors became more complex, a differential evolution approach was used during the fusion and optimization of the data. To verify the performance accuracy of the presented method in this study, a University of Texas at Dallas Multimodal Human Action Datasets (UTD-MHAD) from previous research was used. However, the average recognition rates presented by previous research using respective methods were still low, due to the complexity in the calculation of the optimal values of the acquired data from sensors, as well as the installation environment. Our contribution was based on a method that enabled us to adjust the number of depth cameras and combine this data with inertial sensors (multi-sensors in this study). We applied a differential evolution approach to calculate the optimal values of the added weights. The proposed method achieved an accuracy 10% higher than the previous research results using the same database, indicating a much improved accuracy rate of motion recognition.