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Hyperdimensional Gesture Recognition for Underwater Human Robot Interaction

2025· article· W4415821761 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldEngineering
TopicFerroelectric and Negative Capacitance Devices
Canadian institutionsArtificial Intelligence in Medicine (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGestureGesture recognitionUnderwaterVisibilityAdaptation (eye)Robot

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this paper, we study the problem of gesture recognition as a method for divers to communicate with an underwater robot. Gesture is a common method of communication between divers, and yet autonomous underwater vehicles have very limited capacity to understand gesture given lighting and visibility constraints (e.g., from water turbidity and diver depth). Traditional deep learning methods are limited in this domain because of a lack of sufficient training data. We show that it is not enough to learn a gesture in a laboratory setting, because the appearance changes dramatically underwater. We show how hyperdimensional computing can solve this problem by permitting hypervectors to serve as abstract representations of gestures, yielding rapid adaptation to new environments and new gestures. We experimentally verify this approach using a novel dataset of 6 diving relevant gestures. We show that we can accurately adapt to a gesture learned in a laboratory setting to work with a gesture observed underwater. Our approach compares favorably to a ResNet-18, which performs well in laboratory conditions (91.9% accuracy), but performs poorly underwater (53.9% accuracy). Our proposed approach is capable of rapid adaptation, resulting in an accuracy of 83.8% on underwater gestures with just one additional example from each class added to the support set. Finally, we also show the ability to adapt to new gestures not present in our original training set. We use hypervectors to learn new gestures from the Sign Language MNIST dataset, providing a high level of accuracy with a limited amount of training data.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.635
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.286
Teacher spread0.253 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it