Pantomime without discourse will leave you nearly tranquil, discourse without gestures will wring tears from you.
- Essay on the Origin of Languages, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

A brief overview of gesture recognition can be found here, as part of the Online Compendium of Computer Vision.

An interesting blog about gestures can be found here.

Research Groups:

Human Hand Gesture Research

• A Gesture Recognition System Implemented for HCI - Pennsylvania State University
• Gesture and Sign Language Recognition - TU Delft (NL)
• HandVU - Vision based hand gesture interface, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Computer Vision Based Human-Computer Interaction - Computational Vision and Active Perception Laboratory at KTH (Stockholm, Sweden)
• Michael Stark, Markus Kohler Zyklop - Titel - (I have no idea, it is in German.)
• Gesture Recognition with SensorGloves - human hand and arm gestures.
• VISLab FingerMouse Project Homepage - University of Illinois at Chicago
• Hand Posture Recognition - Dylan Banarse at the University of Wales.
• GESTER - Ben Salem, University of Sheffield.
• Glove-TalkII: An Adaptive Gesture-to-Formant Interface - Fels and Hinton, University of Toronto.
• Gesture recognition Russel Beale at Birmingham, Uk
• Hidden Markov Models for Interactive Learning of Hand Gestures - Lee and Xu at CMU.
• Visual Interpretation of Gestures - Columbia University.
• Gesture Recognition - Kelly and Moezzi, UCSD.
• Orientation Histograms for Hand Gesture Recognition - William Freeman, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs.
• Television control by hand signals - William Freeman, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs.
• Color Glove Hand Tracking - Brigitte Dorner at SFU, Canada
• Vision-Based Robotic Gesture Recognition - Ph.D. thesis of Jochen Triesch at Institut fuer Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany.
• Gesture Recognition Research and Application to Computer Animation - Greg Schmidt, Computer Science/Viz Lab, Texas A&M University.
• Cross-Modal Analysis of Signal and Sense: Data and Computational REsources for Gesture, Speech, and Gaze Research - Francis Quek, Write State University
• Gesture Group Home Page - University of Illinois at Chicago Vision Lab. (defunct link)
• Hand tracking with deformable models Tony Heap at Leeds, Uk. Download Demo! (defunct link)

Human Body Motion Gesture Research

• Visual Recognition of Gestures - Also includes a visual gesture database.
• Oxford Active Vision Group - Human and Hand tracking, Oxford University
• ISCANIT: Recognising Intention in Real-Time for Visually Mediated Interaction - Queen Mary & Westfield College
• Computer Interpretation Of Gestures Made By The Severely Disabled - University of Dundee
• Gesture Recognition, MIT AI Lab Intelligent Room - Overhead and Wall Pointing, Darren Dang.
• Tracking Human Gestures - R. Reilly, University college Dublin.
• Dynamical System Gesture Recognition and Control - Charles Cohen, University of Michigan and Cybernet Systems Corporation.
• Kruegar, M., Artificial Reality - full body participation in computer events. (defunct link)
• Robot Control through Gestures Rene Schaad at AI Lab, Zurich (defunct link)

Pen- and mouse-based research

• Schomaker, Pen gestures from MIAMI ESPRIT project.
• The 3-D Hand Mouse (also see here) and Qualitative Hand Models from Multi-Scale Feature Hierarchies - Computational Vision and Active Perception Laboratory , KTH, Sweden, Lars Bretzner and Tony Lindeberg.
• Dantzer and Accot, Direct manipulation and manipulation through gestures. (defunct link)

Sign Language Recognition

• ASL : Temporal segmentation of finger spelling - University of Delaware.
• ASL : Continuous ASL recognition based on HMMs - Emphasis on modelling ASL phonology.
• ASL : Manual alphabet for ASL: finger spelling recognizer. - Erenshteyn at University of Delaware.
• ASL: Sister Mary of the Internet - Garland Stern, University of Delaware.
• ASL: SignWriting - Center Sutton Movement Writing, Inc.
• ASL: Hidden Markov Model method - Thad Starner, MIT.
• AUSLAN : GRASP - Recognizing Auslan signs using Instrumented Gloves - Waleed at UNSW.
• BSL : Gesture-Based Interaction Philip Harling at York.
• FSL : Sign Languagel Web Site - University of Lyon, France.
• FSL : Sentence Recognition and Understanding - Braffort - France.
• TWL : Rung-Huei Liang - National Taiwan University.
• ASL : GRASP - Recognizing Auslan signs using Instrumented Gloves - Waleed Kaudos, University of New South Wales.

Commercial products

• LiveMove Pro - AiLive, Real-time motion recognition for the Wii Remote.
• UseYourHead - Cybernet System Corporation, Head Tracking Software for controlling commercial Windows games!!!
• CyberGlove® - Virtual Technology.
• GloveGRASP(TM) - HITLab package for SGI computers.
• HumanGlove(TM) - A 20 degree of freedom sensorized glove for VR applications from Humanware S.R.L.
• VTI's Gesture Recognition System - uses joint measurements from a Virtual Technologies CyberGlove instrumented glove to recognize user-defined hand formations.
• Reality Fusion - video based computer interaction.
• Toshiba's Motion Processor - upports real-time recognition and display of kinetic, three-dimensional objects on a PC.
• Sivit - uses real time gesture recognition (pdf file here).
• Pulsar and Mindtel - "Neattools" software can read alot of different input devices and control alot of different outputs. Can be used for experimenting with gesture control of different thing (freeware, supports extensions).
• Rock 'n' Scroll - Button-free Tilt and Gesture Input for Itsy.

Demos

• SignStream(TM) - Database tool for analysis of video captured linguistic data. Boston University. U of Leeds.
• Dyna - Recursive Models of Human Motion
• VisualMouse - Translates user's head motion into the motion of the cursor on the screen, by processing the image from a PC video camera.
• Nouse - A nose tracking system for mouse control. Computational Video Group at the National Research Council of Canada.
• Hand Tracker Demo - Silicon Graphics based, Tony Heap, U of Leeds. (defunct link)

Internet Resources:

Gesture Databases:

• WWW Sign Language Bibliography.
• Gesture Archive - Graeme Sweeney, set up as a gesture data repository. (defunt link -too bad...)

Related Subjects:

• Machine Gesture and Sign Language - Another comprehensive gesture page.
• Facial Expression Resources Home Page.
• Face Recognition Home Page.
• Computer Vision Home page
• Pattern Recognition Home page
• Handwriting Recognition Home page
• NeuroNet (defunct link)

Related Newsgroups:

• comp.ai.vision
• sci.image.processing
• sci.psychology
• comp.ai.neural-nets

Article Archives:

• Neuroprose
• The Vision and Image processing Archive (defunct link)

Upcoming events

• IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (AMFG) Nice, France, Oct 17, 2003/held in conjunction with ICCV-2003
• AVBPA 2001: Third International Conference on Audio- and Video- based Biometric Person Authentication
• Human.Systems 2001: The Conference on Technologies for Human Fac tors and Psycho-Social Adaptation
• 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance
• Fourth IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition
• GW 2000 - The Fourth International Workshop on Gesture and Sign Language Interaction.
• DIAGRAMS 2000: An International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, University of Edinburgh (1-3 September 2000)
• SECOND INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PHYSICALITY AND TANGIBILITY IN
  INTERACTION: THE DISAPPEARING COMPUTER? (1-3 March 2000)
• High Desert Linguistics Society 2nd Student Conference in Linguistics (HDLS-2) (26-27 March 1999)
• GW '99 - The 3rd Gesture Workshop, Gif-sur-Yvette, France (17-19 March 1999)
• VRI '98 - Visual Representations and Interpretations (22-23 September, 1998)
• The Development of Fastrak and Related Technologies for Human Motion Analysis (16 July 1998)
• Digital Resources in the Humanities 1998 (9-12 September 1998)
• Third IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
• ATR Symposium on Face and Object Recognition '97
• International Conference on Image Processing '97

Acknowledgments

Very grateful thanks goes out to Peter Kruizinga, who developed the Face Recognition Home Page. This page is based on his well developed format, and has taught me a lot about home page creation. Graeme Sweeney's page also has many of the above links. My thanks also goes out to Cybernet Systems Corporation for allowing me to maintain this page on their computers. 

This is the site of a government-sponsored contractor. The views and conclusions contained within this website are those of the web authors and should not be interpreted as the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Government.

This page is maintained by Charles Cohen. Any suggestions, corrections, or addition information (please!), send an email to ccohen@cybernet.com

This page last updated 10 April 2008.
All links last tested 15 Jan 1999.