Real time hand gesture recognition including hand segmentation and tracking

In this paper we present a system that performs automatic gesture recognition. The system consists of two main components: (i) A unified technique for segmentation and tracking of face and hands using a skin detection algorithm along with handling occlusion between skin objects to keep track of the status of the occluded parts. This is realized by combining 3 useful features, namely, color, motion and position. (ii) A static and dynamic gesture recognition system. Static gesture recognition is achieved using a robust hand shape classification, based on PCA subspaces, that is invariant to scale along with small translation and rotation transformations. Combining hand shape classification with position information and using DHMMs allows us to accomplish dynamic gesture recognition

Random matrix theory for portfolio optimization: a stability approach

We apply Random Matrix Theory (RMT) on an empirically-measured financial correlation matrix, C, and show that this matrix contains a large amount of noise. In order to determine the sensitivity of the spectral properties of a random matrix to noise, we simulate a set of data and add different volumes of random noise. Having ascertained that the eigenspectrum is independent of the standard deviation of added noise, we use RMT to determine the noise percentage in a correlation matrix based on real data from S&P500. Eigenvalue and eigenvector analyses are applied and the experimental results for each of them are presented to identify qualitatively and quantitatively different spectral properties of the empirical correlation matrix to a random counterpart. Finally we attempt to separate the noisy part from the non-noisy part of C. We apply an existing technique to cleaning C and then discuss its associated problems. We propose a technique of filtering C which has many advantages, from a stability point of view over the existing method of cleaning