CVPR 2011 workshop on gesture
recognition
From activity to language: learning to
recognise the meaning of motion
Richard Bowden
University of
Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK
Whether the task
is recognising an atomic action of an individual or their implied
activity, the continuous multichannel nature of sign language
recognition or the appearance of words on the lips, all approaches can
be categorised at the most basic level as the learning and recognition
of spatio-temporal patterns. The complexity of the problem to some
extend dictates the approaches used e.g. for simple gestures and
actions, holistic descriptors can work well but are less suitable for
the subtitles and complexities of sign. However, in all cases,
inaccuracies in labelling and the curse of dimensionality lead us to
explore new learning approaches that can operate in a weakly supervised
setting. This talk will concentrate on 3 areas covering the spectrum of
spatiotemporal recognition from whole body through to subtle motions of
body parts covering activity and gesture, sign and expression and
finally lip reading. In each case, feature and learning approaches will
be presented which are suited to both the inherent variability as well
as the complexity of the problem.