Hand gesture understanding by weakly-supervised fusing shallow/deep image attributes

摘要

Accurately recognizing human hand gestures is a useful component in many modern intelligent systems, such as identification authentication, human computer interaction, and sign language recognition. Conventional approaches are typically based on shallow visual features and relatively simple backgrounds, which cannot readily recognize partially occluded hand gestures with sophisticated backgrounds. In this work, we propose a unified hand gesture recognition framework by optimally fusing a set of shallow/deep finger-level image attributes, based on which a weakly-supervised ranking algorithm is designed to select semantically salient regions for gesture understanding. More specifically, given a rich number of hand gesture images, we employ the well-known BING object proposal generator to extract hundreds of object patches that potentially draw human visual attention. Since the hundreds of object patches are still too many for building an effective recognition system, a weakly-supervised metric is proposed to rank them by extracting multiple shallow/deep features. And visual semantics are encoded at region-level by transferring the image-level semantic tags into various human gesture image regions by a weakly-supervised learning paradigm Apparently, the top-ranking highly salient object patches are highly indicative to human visual perception of human hand gesture, Thus we extract their ImageNet-CNN features and further concatenate them. Finally, the concatenated deep feature is fed into a multi-class SVM for classifying each hand gesture image into a particular type. Comprehensive experimental validations have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed hybrid-feature-based hand gesture categorization.