Motion Fused Frames: Data Level Fusion Strategy for Hand Gesture Recognition

Acquiring spatio-temporal states of an action is the most crucial step for action classification. In this paper, we propose a data level fusion strategy, Motion Fused Frames (MFFs), designed to fuse motion information into static images as better representatives of spatio-temporal states of an action. MFFs can be used as input to any deep learning architecture with very little modification on the network. We evaluate MFFs on hand gesture recognition tasks using three video datasets - Jester, ChaLearn LAP IsoGD and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture Datasets - which require capturing long-term temporal relations of hand movements. Our approach obtains very competitive performance on Jester and ChaLearn benchmarks with the classification accuracies of 96.28% and 57.4%, respectively, while achieving state-of-the-art performance with 84.7% accuracy on NVIDIA benchmark.

1. Introduction

Action and gesture recognition have become very popular topics within computer vision field in the last few years, especially after the application of deep learning in this domain. Similar to other areas of computer vision, the recent work on action and gesture recognition is mainly based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs).