Modified levenshtein distance for real-time gesture recognition

In this paper, a real time dynamic gesture recognition method based on a modified Levenshtein distance is proposed. The method addresses the issues faced in dynamic gesture recognition methods that are due to gesture variability within the class due to differences in the gesture speed. Since the gesture speed and duration will vary from one gesture to another, or from one person to the next, without taking this variability into account there will be an increase in the number of recognition errors. Here, we use a modified Levenshtein distance to represent each gesture class by one gesture exemplar and no restrictions on the gesture speed is necessary. Experiments demonstrate real-time gesture recognition rates of 93.9% for gestures of variable speed.