Recognizing expressive movement in arm gestures using Hidden Markov Models

Movement is one of the most basic human skills that used for communicating and interacting with the environment. Although we have an intuitive understanding of our gestures, it is hard to explain their quality. One would describe the human gestures as a collection of various actions for performing different tasks. True, but it does not explain how the tasks are performed, which is essential for having a more natural representation of movement. In this work we use Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), which is an analytic and experiential system for interpreting human body movement, to understand the expressive aspects of human gestures and we try to recognize them in hand movement using a supervised learning method with Hidden Markov Models (HMMs),; We first define the weight, space, and time characteristics of movement, which are described as the Basic Effort Factors (BEF) in LMA and we construct a classifier for each BEF using HMMs. We use a Microsoft Kinect to capture the body movement and try to recognize the quality of each BEF in hand gestures. Various preprocessing are done on the motion data to extract features that can describe the movement qualities. We use a windowing technique to segment the gestures into smaller sequences and allow for continuous gesture recognition. Various experiments are done to identify the optimal features and the parameters of each model, and we also address different problems in implementing the models.; Our research showed promising results in recognizing and distinguishing the BEFs of hand movement. The importance of this research is in developing systems that require deeper and more natural understanding of body movement, such as systems for recognizing musical gestures and dance, or producing computer animation.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Systems & Entrepreneurial Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Amanzadeh, Mohammad

Contributors dc:contributor

• Garnett, Guy E.

• Gesture Recognition
• Laban Movement Analysis
• Expressive Movement
• Hidden Markov Models

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Mohammad Amanzadeh

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/72866

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/72866