Robust head gestures recognition for assistive technology

Abstract

This paper presents a system capable of recognizing six head gestures: nodding, shaking, turning right, turning left, looking up, and looking down. The main difference of our system compared to other methods is that the Hidden Markov Models presented in this paper, are fully connected and consider all possible states in any given order, providing the following advantages to the system: (1) allows unconstrained movement of the head and (2) it can be easily integrated into a wearable device (e.g. glasses, neck-hung devices), in which case it can robustly recognize gestures in the presence of ego-motion. Experimental results show that this approach outperforms common methods that use restricted HMMs for each gesture. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.