Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets

Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann

Gesture recognition by learning local motion signatures using smartphones

In recent years, gesture or activity recognition is an important area of research for the modern health care system. An activity is recognized by learning from human body postures and signatures. Presently all smartphones are equipped with accelerometer and gyroscopes sensors, and the reading of these sensors can be utilized as an input to a classifier to predict the human activity. Although the human activity recognition gained a notable scientific interest in recent years, still accuracy, scalability and robustness need significant improvement to cater as a solution of most of the real world problems. This paper aims to fill the identified research gap and proposes Grid Search based Logistic Regression and Gradient Boosting Decision Tree multistage prediction model. UCI-HAR dataset has been used to perform Gesture recognition by learning local motion signatures. The proposed approach exhibits improved accuracy over preexisting techniques concerning to human activity recognition