Three-Dimensional Integral Imaging for Gesture Recognition Under Occlusions

Over the last years, three-dimensional (3-D) imaging has been applied to human action and gesture recognition, usually in the form of depth maps from RGB-D sensors. An alternative which has not been explored is 3-D integral imaging, aside from a recent preliminary study which shows that it can be an effective sensory modality with some advantages over the conventional monocular imaging. Since integral imaging has also been shown to be a powerful tool in other visual tasks (e.g., object reconstruction and recognition) under challenging conditions (e.g., low illumination, occlusions), and its passive long-range operation brings benefits over active close-range devices, a natural question is whether these advantages also hold for gesture recognition. Furthermore, occlusions are present in many real-world scenarios in gesture recognition, but it is an elusive problem which has scarcely been addressed. As far as we know, this letter analyzes for the first time the potential of integral imaging for gesture recognition under occlusions, by comparing it to monocular imaging and to RGB-D sensory data. Empirical results corroborates the benefits of 3-D integral imaging for gesture recognition, mainly under occlusions.