Bayesian fusion of hidden Markov models for understanding bimanual movements

Understanding hand and body gestures is a part of a wide spectrum of current research in computer vision and human-computer interaction. A part of this can be the recognition of movements in which the two hands move simultaneously to do something or imply a meaning. We present a Bayesian network for fusing hidden Markov models in order to recognise a bimanual movement. A bimanual movement is tracked and segmented by a tracking algorithm. Hidden Markov models are assigned to the segments in order to learn and recognize the partial movement within each segment. A Bayesian network fuses the HMMs in order to perceive the movement of the two hands as a single entity

Action classification using a discriminative non-parametric hidden Markov model

We classify human actions occurring in videos, using the skeletal joint positions extracted from a depth image sequence as features. Each action class is represented by a non-parametric Hidden Markov Model (NP-HMM) and the model parameters are learnt in a discriminative way. Specifically, we use a Bayesian framework based on Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) to automatically infer the cardinality of hidden states and formulate a discriminative function based on distance between Gaussian distributions to improve classification performance. We use elliptical slice sampling to efficiently sample parameters from the complex posterior distribution induced by our discriminative likelihood function. We illustrate our classification results for action class models trained using this technique