Sylvie Gibet - Böcker

The international Gesture Workshops have become the leading interdisciplinary events for dissemination of the latest results on gesture-based communication. The goal of these workshops is to bring together researchers who want to meet and share ideas on advanced research on gesture related to multidisciplinary scienti?c ?elds. Depending on the ?elds, the objectives can be very di?erent. While physiology and biomechanics aim to extract fundamental knowledge of physical gesture, computer sciences try to capture di?erent aspects of gesture and extract features that help to identify, interpret or rebuild the underlying mechanisms of communication gestures. Other approaches and methodologies are followed by cognitive sciences and linguistics, bringing a complementary - derstanding of motor control and gesture meaning. The results can be enhanced by technological applications or demonstrations. For example, gestural inter- tion in an augmented or virtual reality context leads to active application areas. Since 1996 gesture workshops have been held approximately every two years, with full post-proceedings usually published by Springer.

The need to improve communication between humans and computers has been instrumental in de ning new modalities of communication, and new ways of interacting with machines. Gestures can convey information for which other modalities are not e cient or suitable. In natural and user-friendly interaction, gesturescanbeused,asasinglemodality,orcombinedinmultimodalinteraction schemes which involvespeech,or textual media. Speci cation methodologiescan be developed to design advanced interaction processes in order to de ne what kind of gestures are used, which meaning they convey, and what the paradigms of interaction are. Research centred on gesture interaction has recently provided signi cant technologicalimprovements, in particular: gesture capture and tra- ing (from video streams or other input devices), motion recognition, motion generation, and animation. In addition, active research in the elds of signal processing, pattern recognition, arti cial intelligence, and linguistics is relevant to the areas covered by the multidisciplinary research on gesture as a means of communication.Resulting fromathree-dayinternationalworkshopin Gif-sur-Yvette,France, with 80 participants from ten countries all over the world, this book presents contributions on gesture under the focus of human-computer communication. The workshop was run by Universit e Paris Sud, Orsay, on the lines of GW'96 at York University, UK, and GW'97 at Bielefeld University, Germany. Its purpose was to bring together scientists from researchand industrial organisationswo- ing on all aspects of gesture modelling and interaction. The book is organised in sixsections,coveringhumanperceptionandproductionofgesture,gestureloc- isation and movement segmentation, vision-based recognition and sign language recognition, gesture synthesis and animation, and multimodality.