Lightweight Deep Symmetric Positive Definite Manifold Network for Real-Time 3D Hand Gesture Recognition

Mostefa Ben Naceur &
Luc Brun &
Olivier Lezoray.

This paper proposes a new neural network based on Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold learning for real-time skeleton-based hand gesture recognition. The transformation of the input skeletal data into SPD matrices allows to encode efficiently high-order statistics such as covariances or correlations between the joints’ features. These matrices are combined and transformed by our deep neural network which is thus constrained to work on the manifold of such matrices. The online recognition is performed using two sliding windows moving along the gesture’s stream in order to simultaneously detect and classify the occurrence of a new gesture within the stream. The proposed network is validated on a challenging dataset and shows state-of-the-art performances both in terms of accuracy and inference time.