Body movement analysis and recognition

In this chapter, a nonverbalway of communication for human-robot interaction by understanding human upper body gestures will be addressed. The human- robot interaction system based on a novel combination of sensors is proposed. It allows one person to interact with a humanoid social robot with natural body language. The robot can understand the meaning of human upper body gestures and express itself by using a combination of body movements, facial expressions, and verbal language. A set of 12 upper body gestures is involved for communication. Human-object interactions are also included in these gestures. The gestures can be characterized by the head, arm, and hand posture information. CyberGlove II is employed to capture the hand posture. This feature is combined with the head and arm posture information captured from Microsoft Kinect. This is a new sensor solution for human-gesture capture. Based on the body posture data, an effective and realtime human gesture recognitionmethod is proposed. For experiments, a human body gesture dataset was built. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.