Facilitated Gesture Recognition Based Interfaces for People with Upper Extremity Physical Impairments

A gesture recognition based interface was developed to facilitate people with upper extremity physical impairments as an alternative way to perform laboratory experiments that require ‘physical’ manipulation of components. A color, depth and spatial information based particle filter framework was constructed with unique descriptive features for face and hands representation. The same feature encoding policy was subsequently used to detect, track and recognize users’ hands. Motion models were created employing dynamic time warping (DTW) method for better observation encoding. Finally, the hand trajectories were classified into different classes (commands) by applying the CONDESATION method and, in turn, an interface was designed for robot control, with a recognition accuracy of 97.5%. To assess the gesture recognition and control policies, a validation experiment consisting in controlling a mobile service robot and a robotic arm in a laboratory environment was conducted.