In-Place Gestures Classification via Long-term Memory Augmented Network

Abstract: In-place gesture-based virtual locomotion techniques enable users to control their viewpoint and intuitively move in the 3D virtual environment. A key research problem is to accurately and quickly recognize in-place gestures, since they can trigger specific movements of virtual viewpoints and enhance user experience. However, to achieve real-time experience, only short-term sensor sequence data (up to about 300ms, 6 to 10 frames) can be taken as input, which actually affects the classification performance due to limited spatio-temporal information. In this paper, we propose a novel long-term memory augmented network for in-place gestures classification. It takes as input both short-term gesture sequence samples and their corresponding long-term sequence samples that provide extra relevant spatio-temporal information in the training phase. We store long-term sequence features with an external memory queue. In addition, we design a memory augmented loss to help cluster features of the same class and push apart features from different classes, thus enabling our memory queue to memorize more relevant long-term sequence features. In the inference phase, we input only short-term sequence samples to recall the stored features accordingly, and fuse them together to predict the gesture class. We create a large-scale in-place gestures dataset from 25 participants with 11 gestures. Our method achieves a promising accuracy of 95.1% with a latency of 192ms, and an accuracy of 97.3% with a latency of 312ms, and is demonstrated to be superior to recent in-place gesture classification techniques. User study also validates our approach. Our source code and dataset will be made available to the community.