Making The Unknown More Certain: A Stacked Ensemble Classifier for Open Gesture Recognition with a Social Robot

We introduce a novel stacked ensemble classifier for the unconstrained recognition of known and unknown gestural input data in nonverbal communication with a social robot. The architecture utilizes three separate CNNs of different expected data input size and combines their output predictions to a unified estimate. Analysis shows that in comparison to a single CNN architecture, the combined estimate reduces prediction confidence values for unknown gestural movement segments, making the system able to identify unknown data input with higher certainty under both laboratory and real environment conditions. In a human-robot interaction experiment, we are able to improve unknown class detection accuracy by up to 40% under maintained or equal known class recognition performance, and hence considerably enhance the overall robustness of the recognition system.