Comparing Some Distances in Template-based 2D Gesture Recognition

Euclidean distance is traditionally used to compare a gesture candidate against gesture templates in two-dimensional gesture recognizers. This paper compares two distances borrowed from other domains of computer science used in template-based two-dimensional gesture recognizers: the Mahalanobis distance, typically used in computer vision and statistics, and the Jaro-Winckler distance, typically used in information retrieval and pattern recognition. Although the geometric interpretation of these distances is less straightforward for designers, there is a significant impact of the Mahalanobis distance on recognition rate, but not for the Jaro-Winkler one.