Arm movement recognition for flag signaling with Kinect sensor

This paper propose a simple recognition method for arm movement in Japanese flag semaphore. The method consists of three main process, detection of an arm position, discrimination of a semaphore form to the detected one, and identification of a Japanese Katakana character from a sequence of semaphore forms. Based on the method, an experimental system for flag signaling was implemented by Kinect sensor device and OpenNI/NITE software library. A preliminary experiment indicated that the method might be usable for beginner to learn the flag signaling. But it was also found that the method should be improved in some misrecognition.