Real Time Head Gesture Recognition

These days we are aiming to develop smart interfacing techniques like- touchscreens, verbal
instructions, etc. Gesture Computing is one of the very emerging fields of research in this respect. To
device a gesture driven computing device we use different gestures like- head, hand, eye etc. Head
gesture is the most natural form of gesture in human nature; also it is independent of language.

Through this summer research fellowship I would like to learn and develop a head gesture driven
application to:-

i.) Recognize the head portion of the user from video (feature detection) which is being taken
from a webcam, so that we need not to have special infrastructure like stereo camera etc.
For recognizing we can use Lucas-Kanade tracking algorithm because of its high accuracy
and efficiency.
ii.) Predict the various head gestures and do the necessary action. For this we have various
techniques like- Finite State Machines (FSM) model, Hidden Markov Models (HMM), and
much complex Neural Networks. But for just prediction simple model- FSM can also serve
the purpose with considerations.
iii.) Through this we can achieve good efficiency model of gesture recognition, but to make it
more efficient we can use contextual clues to make the algorithm more accurate. Context
based Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) improves the performance of head gesture
recognition.

Such type of applications can be greatly used in designing smart inexpensive interactive kiosks. Also it
can be developed in such a way to be used by physically handicapped persons who are unable to use
conventional computers.