Kernel-based sparse representation for gesture recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel sparse representation based framework for classifying complicated human gestures captured as multi-variate time series (MTS). The novel feature extraction strategy, CovSVDK, can overcome the problem of inconsistent lengths among MTS data and is robust to the large variability within human gestures. Compared with PCA and LDA, the CovSVDK features are more effective in preserving discriminative information and are more efficient to compute over large-scale MTS datasets. In addition, we propose a new approach to kernelize sparse representation. Through kernelization, realized dictionary atoms are more separable for sparse coding algorithms and nonlinear relationships among data are conveniently transformed into linear relationships in the kernel space, which leads to more effective classification. Finally, the superiority of the proposed framework is demonstrated through extensive experiments. •An effective feature extraction method is proposed for gesture recognition.•Kernel trick is applied to learning the dictionary for sparse representation.•Comparisons with state-of-the-art methods are performed.•Superior recognition rate is achieved.