Section: New Results

Match-Up & Conquer: A Two-Step Technique for Recognizing Unconstrained Bimanual and Multi-Finger Touch Input

We present a simple, two-step technique for recognizing multi-touch gesture input independently of how users articulate gestures, i.e., using one or two hands, one or multiple fingers, synchronous or asynchronous stroke input. To this end, and for the first time in the gesture literature, we introduce a preprocessing step specifically for multi-touch gestures (Match-Up) that clusters together similar strokes produced by different fingers, before running a gesture recognizer (Conquer). We report gains in recognition accuracy of up to 10% leveraged by our new preprocessing step, which manages to construct a more adequate representation for multi-touch gestures in terms of key strokes. It is our hope that the Match-Up technique will add to the practitioners’ toolkit of gesture preprocessing techniques, as a first step toward filling today’s lack of algorithmic knowledge to process multi-touch input and leading toward the design of more efficient and accurate recognizers for touch surfaces. [27]