A need exists for intuitive hand gesture machine interaction in which the machine recognizes gestures and the human feels comfortable and natural in their execution. The gesture vocabulary design problem is rigorously formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Psycho-physiological measures (intuitiveness, comfort) and gesture recognition accuracy are taken as the multi-objective factors. The hand gestures are static and recognized by a vision based fuzzy c-means classifier. A meta-heuristic approach decomposes the problem into two sub-problems: finding the subsets of gestures that meet a minimal accuracy requirement, and matching gestures to commands to maximize the human factors objective. The result is a set of Pareto optimal solutions in which no objective may be increased without a concomitant decrease in another. Several solutions from the Pareto set are selected by the user using prioritized objectives. The method is tested for a simulated car — maze navigation task. Validation tests were conducted to substantiate the claim that solutions that maximize intuitiveness, comfort, and recognition accuracy performance measures can be used as proxies for the minimization task time objective. Learning and memorability were also tested.

 

Juan Wachs is a postdoctoral research associate at the Naval Postgraduate School’s MOVES Institute. His research interests are machine and computer vision, robotics, tele-operations, human factors, assistive technologies and health support systems. He is also affiliated with the RAICES project at Universidad de Buenos Aires, where he taught as a visiting professor in August 2008. His work on the Gestix project led to the first in vivo implementation of a hand gesture system for the manipulation of medical images during surgery in 2006. From 2000 to 2007, he was part of a team of researchers working in the Virtual Reality and Telerobotics Lab at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Juan Wachs is a member of IEEE and the Operation Research Society of Israel (ORSIS). He has published in journals including IEEE Trans. Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Journal of American Medical Informatics, Journal of Image and Graphics, and the International Journal of Semantic Computing. He has taught digital electronics, multimedia and web development at ORT and Intel Colleges, Israel. He received his B.Ed.Tech in Electrical Education from the ORT Academic College in Jerusalem, his M.Sc and Ph.D in Industrial Engineering and Management, Information Systems and Intelligent Systems tracks, respectively, from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.