The Understanding of Meaningful Events in Gesture-Based Interaction - Intelligent Video Event Analysis and Understanding - page 3

anthropomorphize unanimated objects they are interacting with hence by attributing
human-computer interactions the same characteristics that a human-human dialogue
or communication would posses. For example, according to Sharma and Kurian
[46]:
“Verbal and non-verbal human behavior form the events for human communication.
Verbal behavior makes use of language, while the nonverbal behavior employs body
postures, gestures and actions of different kinds.”
The same verbal and non-verbal behavior are employed by humans whether they
are having as interaction partner another human or a computer system. Therefore,
it can be expected that the feedback received from the computer would also be
interpreted as a communication event. The experience of previous human-human
communications is used unconsciously for human-computer interaction for which
the feedback mechanisms are interpreted in a similar manner. Figure 1 illustrates the
different expressions and roles of events in the human-computer interaction cycle.
Fig. 1 Gestures are detected and recognized by monitoring specific events that mark them in
the video stream while the appropriate feedback of a recognized gesture is perceived as an
interaction event by the human participant.
The motivation behind the gesture-event relationship is thus introduced and dis-
cussed: events define and segment gestures while correctly identified gestures rep-
resent themselves events in the human-computer interaction cycle. Section 2 of
the chapter describes techniques which are commonly used for spotting gestures
in video frames by using event-based monitoring while section 3 brings evidence