User independent hand gesture recognition by accelerated DTW

Hand gesture recognition is becoming increasingly popular for applications in ubiquitous computing environment. Accelerometer based methods have proven themselves to be competitive in terms of both portability and recognition accuracy. But there are only a few algorithms which have achieved moderate accuracies in user independent gesture recognition. A novel accelerometer based user independent hand gesture recognition algorithm is proposed in this paper. For validation of accuracy the test was run over 3200 samples collected from 5 users over 5 days. The overall accuracy was found to be 96.4% for user independent gesture recognition. A high recognition accuracy and possibility of simpler implementation also gives this algorithm an upper hand among competitive methods published in recent literatures. A hardware-accelerated dynamic time warping (DTW) implementation is also proposed to pave the way towards continuous gesture recognition for DTW based methods.