Combinations of eigenspace and GMM with Kinect sensor-extracted action gesture features for person identity recognition

Abstract

Purpose

The Kinect sensor released by Microsoft is well-known for its effectiveness on human gesture recognition. Gesture recognition by Kinect has been proved to be an efficient command operation and provides an additional human-computer interface in addition to the traditional speech recognition. For Kinect gesture recognition in the application of gesture command operations, recognition of the active user making the gesture command to Kinect will be an extremely crucial problem. The purpose of this paper is to propose a recognition method for recognizing the person identity of an active user using combined eigenspace and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with Kinect-extracted action gesture features.

Design/methodology/approach

Several Kinect-derived gesture features will be explored for determining the effective pattern features in the active user recognition task. In this work, a separate Kinect-derived feature design for eigenspace recognition and GMM classification is presented for achieving the optimal performance of each individual classifier. In addition to Kinect-extracted feature designs for active user recognition, this study will further develop a combined recognition method, called combined eigenspace-GMM, which properly hybridizes the decision information of both the eigenspace and the GMM for making a more reliable user recognition result.

Findings

Active user recognition using an effective combination of eigenspace and GMM with well-developed active gesture features in Kinect-based active user recognition will have an outstanding performance on the recognition accuracy. The presented Kinect-based user recognition system using the presented approach will further have the competitive benefits of recognition on both gesture commands and providing users of gesture commands.

Originality/value

A hybridized scheme of eigenspace and GMM performs better than eigenspace-alone or GMM-alone on recognition accuracy of active user recognition; a separate Kinect-derived feature design for eigenspace recognition and GMM classification is presented for achieving the optimal performance of the individual classifier; combined eigenspace-GMM active user recognition belonging to model-based active user recognition design has a fine extension on increasing the recognition rate by adjusting recognition models.

Citation

Ding, I.-J. and Wu, Z.-G. (2016), "Combinations of eigenspace and GMM with Kinect sensor-extracted action gesture features for person identity recognition", Engineering Computations, Vol. 33 No. 8, pp. 2489-2503. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-02-2016-0076