What is Gesture Recognition

Progress and technological innovation achieved in recent years, particularly in the area of entertainment and games, have promoted the creation of more natural and intuitive human-computer interfaces. For example, natural interaction devices such as Microsoft Kinect allow users to explore a more expressive way of human-computer communication by recognizing body gestures. In this context, several Supervised Machine Learning techniques have been proposed to recognize gestures. However, scarce research works have focused on a comparative study of the behavior of these techniques. Therefore, this chapter presents an evaluation of 4 Machine Learning techniques by using the Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC-12) Kinect gesture dataset, which involves 30 people performing 12 different gestures. Accuracy was evaluated with different techniques obtaining correct-recognition rates close to 100% in some results. Briefly, the experiments performed in this chapter are likely to provide new insights into the application of Machine Learning technique to facilitate the task of gesture recognition.