Finger Gesture Spotting from Long Sequences Based on Multi-Stream Recurrent Neural Networks

Gesture spotting is an essential task for recognizing finger gestures used to control in-car touchless interfaces. Automated methods to achieve this task require to detect video segments where gestures are observed, to discard natural behaviors of users’ hands that may look as target gestures, and be able to work online. In this paper, we address these challenges with a recurrent neural architecture for online finger gesture spotting. We propose a multi-stream network merging hand and hand-location features, which help to discriminate target gestures from natural movements of the hand, since these may not happen in the same 3D spatial location. Our multi-stream recurrent neural network (RNN) recurrently learns semantic information, allowing to spot gestures online in long untrimmed video sequences. In order to validate our method, we collect a finger gesture dataset in an in-vehicle scenario of an autonomous car. 226 videos with more than 2100 continuous instances were captured with a depth sensor. On this dataset, our gesture spotting approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an improvement of about 10% and 15% of recall and precision, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrated that by combining with an existing gesture classifier (a 3D Convolutional Neural Network), our proposal achieves better performance than previous hand gesture recognition methods.