Synthesis of spatio-temporal descriptors for dynamic hand gesture recognition using genetic programming

Automatic gesture recognition has received much attention due to its potential in various applications. In this paper, we successfully apply an evolutionary method-genetic programming (GP) to synthesize machine learned spatio-temporal descriptors for automatic gesture recognition instead of using hand-crafted descriptors. In our architecture, a set of primitive low-level 3D operators are first randomly assembled as tree-based combinations, which are further evolved generation-by-generation through the GP system, and finally a well performed combination will be selected as the best descriptor for high-level gesture recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of using GP to evolve spatio-temporal descriptors for gesture recognition. We address this as a domain-independent optimization issue and evaluate our proposed method, respectively, on two public dynamic gesture datasets: Cambridge hand gesture dataset and Northwestern University hand gesture dataset to demonstrate its generalizability. The experimental results manifest that our GP-evolved descriptors can achieve better recognition accuracies than state-of-the-art hand-crafted techniques.