A Survey of Hand Posture and Gesture Recognition Techniques and Technology (LaViola – 1999)

Current Mood: studious

Blogs I Commented On:

• Aaron Wolin
• Katie Dahmen
• Josh Johnston

Summary:
This is basically a paper survey on hand gesture recognition, giving an overview of the technology for the domain at that time. The first part of the paper discusses glove- and vision-based approaches in handling hand gesture recognition and the data collected from them. The paper then shifts into discussion of algorithmic techniques that can be applied to input devices, ranging from feature extraction to learning algorithms. The last section then goes into depth of applications that can benefit from the devices and techniques discussion previously, ranging from sign language to virtual reality.

Discussion:
Since this paper is a PhD thesis, it’s a very long paper. Surprisingly enough, it’s an easy read and does a great job giving an overview of the types of topics that our class is focusing on. Even though it was written almost a decade ago, this thesis is still very relevant for today’s readers. That may be attributed to how well the author covered the spectrum of the field and maybe also the lack of huge changes in the field since then. While the thesis could be faulted by some for not going deep enough in some topics, I thought it was a great overall paper nonetheless.