Traditional studies in vision‐based hand gesture recognition remain rooted in view‐dependent representations, and hence users are forced to be fronto‐parallel to the camera. To solve this problem, view‐invariant gesture recognition aims to make the recognition result independent of viewpoint changes. However, in current works the view‐invariance is achieved at the price of mixing different gesture patterns that have similar trajectory curve shape but different semantic meanings. For example, the gesture ‘push’ can be mistaken as ‘drag’ from another viewpoint. To address this shortcoming, in this study, the authors use a shape descriptor to extract the view‐invariant features of a three‐dimensional (3D) trajectory. As the shape features are invariant to omnidirectional viewpoint changes, the orientation features are then added into weight different rotation angles so that similar trajectory shapes are better separated. The proposed method was conducted on two different databases, including a popular Australian Sign Language database and a challenging Kinect Hand Trajectory database. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a higher average recognition rate than the state‐of‐the‐art approaches, and can better distinguish confusing gestures while meeting the view‐invariant condition.
This paper proposes a framework of applying only the EGG signal for speech synthesis in the limited categories of contents scenario. EGG is a sort of physiological signal which can reflect the trends of the vocal cord movement. Note that EGG’s different acquisition method contrasted with speech signals, we exploit its application in speech synthesis under the following two scenarios. (1) To synthesize speeches under high noise circumstances, where clean speech signals are unavailable. (2) To enable dumb people who retain vocal cord vibration to speak again. Our study consists of two stages, EGG to text and text to speech. The first is a text content recognition model based on Bi-LSTM, which converts each EGG signal sample into the corresponding text with a limited class of contents. This model achieves 91.12% accuracy on the validation set in a 20-class content recognition experiment. Then the second step synthesizes speeches with the corresponding text and the EGG signal. Based on modified Tacotron-2, our model gains the Mel cepstral distortion (MCD) of 5.877 and the mean opinion score (MOS) of 3.87, which is comparable with the state-of-the-art performance and achieves an improvement by 0.42 and a relatively smaller model size than the origin Tacotron-2. Considering to introduce the characteristics of speakers contained in EGG to the final synthesized speech, we put forward a fine-grained fundamental frequency modification method, which adjusts the fundamental frequency according to EGG signals and achieves a lower MCD of 5.781 and a higher MOS of 3.94 than that without modification.