Skip to main content
Log in

Human gesture recognition using a simplified dynamic Bayesian network

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Multimedia Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In video-based human gesture recognition, it is very important to combine useful features and analyze the dynamic structure thereof as efficiently as possible. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic Bayesian network model that is a simplified model of dynamics at the level of hidden variables and employs observation windows of observation time slices for robust modeling and handling of noise and other variabilities. The proposed Simplified dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) was tested on a gesture database and an American sign language database. According to the experiments, the proposed DBN outperformed other methods: Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), conventional Bayesian Networks (BNs), DBNs, and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The proposed DBN achieved 98 % recognition accuracy in gesture recognition and 94.6 % in ASL recognition whereas the HMM and the CRF did 80 and 86 % in gesture recognition and 75.4 and 85.4 % in ASL (American Sign Language) recognition, respectively.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Korea University Gesture Database, http://gesturedb.korea.ac.kr.

  2. American Sign Language Database, http://www.bu.edu/asllrp/ncslgr.html.

  3. We would like to thank H.-D. Yang, the first author of [22] for providing the feature data and the results.

References

  1. Mitra, S., Acharya, T.: Gesture recognition: A survey. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part C Appl. Rev. 37(3), 311–324 (2007). doi:10.1109/TSMCC.2007.893280

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bian, W., Tao, D., Rui, Y.: Cross-domain human action recognition. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B Appl. Rev. 42(2), 298–307 (2012). doi:10.1109/TSMCB.2011.2166761

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Dielmann, A., Renals, S.: Automatic meeting segmentation using dynamic bayesian networks. IEEE Trans. Multimed. 9(1), 25–36 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Du, Y., Chen, F., Xu, W., Li, Y.: Recognizing interaction activities using dynamic bayesian network. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, vol. 1, pp. 618–621 (2006)

  5. Robertson, N., Reid, I.: Behaviour understanding in video: a combined method. In: Proceedings of The Tenth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, vol. 1, pp. 808–815 (2005)

  6. Suk, H.I., Shin, B.K., Lee, S.W.: Hand gesture recognition based on dynamic bayesian network framework. Pattern Recognit. 43(9), 3059–3072 (2010)

  7. Wang, T., Diao, Q., Zhang, Y., Song, G., Lai, C., Bradski, G.: A dynamic bayesian network approach to multi-cue based visual tracking. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, vol. 2, pp. 167–170 (2004)

  8. Rabiner, L.R.: A tutorial on hidden markov models and selected applications in speech recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE, vol. 77, pp. 257–286 (1989)

  9. Lafferty, J., McCallum, A., Pereira, F.: Conditional random fields: Probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 282–289, USA (2001)

  10. Fenton, N., Neil, M.: Making decisions: using bayesian nets and mcda. Knowl. Based Syst. 14, 307–325 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Heckerman, D.: A tutorial on learning with Bayesian networks. Technical report msr-tr-95-06, Microsoft Research (1995)

  12. Murphy, K.: Dynamic bayesian networks: Representation, inference and learning. Ph.D. thesis, University Of California, Berkeley (2002)

  13. Bitmes, J., Bartels, C.: Graphical model architectures for speech recognition. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 22(5), 89–100 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Ji, Q., Lan, P., Looney, C.: A probabilistic framework for modeling and real-time monitoring human fatigue. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. A 36(35), 862–875 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Nikolopoulos, S., Papadopoulos, G., Kompatsiaris, I., Patras, I.: Evidence-driven image interpretation by combining implicit and explicit knowledge in a bayesian network. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B Appl. Rev. 41(5), 1366–1381 (2011). doi:10.1109/TSMCB.2011.2147781

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Park, S., Aggarwal, J.: A hierarchical bayesian network for event recognition of human actions and interactions. Multimed. Syst. 10(2), 164–179 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Darrell, T., Pentland, A.: Space-time gestures. In: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. In: Proceedings of CVPR ’93, 1993 IEEE Computer Society Conference on (1993)

  18. Li, H., Greenspan, M.: Multi-scale gesture recognition from time-varying contours. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. 1, 226–234 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Sakoe, H., Chiba, S.: Dynamic programming algorithm optimization for spoken word recognition.  IEEE Trans. Acoustics Speech Signal Proc. 26(1), 43–49 (1978)

  20. Ahmad, M., Lee, S.W.: Human action recognition using shape and CLG-motion flow from multi-view image sequences. Pattern Recognit. 41(7), 2237–2252 (2008)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Starner, T., Weaver, J., Pentland, A.: Real-time american sign language recognition using desk and wearable computer based video. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 20(12), 1371–1375 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Yang, H.D., Sclaroff, S., Lee, S.W.: Sign language spotting with a threshold model based on conditional random fields. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 31(7), 1264–1277 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Moenne-Loccoz, N., Bremond, F., Thonnat, M.: Recurrent bayesian network for the recognition of human behaviors from video. In: Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, pp. 68–77 (2003)

  24. Wang, S., Quattoni, A., Morency, L.P., Demirdjian, D., Darrell, T.: Hidden conditional random fields for gesture recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1521–1527 (2006)

  25. Murphy, K.: Bayes net toolbox for Matlab (2014). http://code.google.com/p/bnt/Sept.(2014)

  26. Kudo, T.: CRF++: Yet another CRF toolkit (2005). http://code.google.com/p/crfpp/Sept.(2014)

  27. Lee, H.K., Kim, J.H.: An hmm-based threshold model approach for gesture recognition. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Recognit. 21(10), 961–973 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Viola, P., Jones, M.: Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Patter Recognition, vol. 1, pp. 511–519 (2001)

  29. Yang, H.D., Lee, S.W., Lee, S.W.: Multiple human detection and tracking based on weighted temporal texture features. Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell. 20(3), 377–391 (2006)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Implementation of Technologies for Identification, Behavior, and Location of Human based on Sensor Network Fusion Program through the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (Grant No. 10041629) and the 2014 R&D Program for S/W Computing Industrial Core Technology through the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning/Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (Project No. 2014-044-023-001), Korea.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seong-Whan Lee.

Additional information

Communicated by Q. Tian.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Roh, MC., Lee, SW. Human gesture recognition using a simplified dynamic Bayesian network. Multimedia Systems 21, 557–568 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-014-0414-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-014-0414-9

Keywords

Navigation