The International Gesture Workshop is an interdisciplinary event where researchers working on human gesture-based communication present advanced research currently inprogressandexchangeideasongestureacrossmultidisciplinaryscienti?cdisciplines. This workshop encompasses all fundamental aspects of gestural studies in the ?eld of human-computer interaction and simulation, including all multifaceted issues of m- elling, analysis and synthesis of human gesture, encompassing hand and body gestures andfacial expressions. A focusof these eventsis a sharedinterest in usinggesturein the contextofsign languageanalysis, understandingandsynthesis. Anotherstreamof int- est is the user-centric approach of considering gesture in multimodal human-computer interaction, in the framework of the integration of such interaction into the natural - vironment of users. In addition to welcoming submission of work by established - searchers, it is the tradition of the GW series of workshops to encourage submission of student work at various stages of completion, enabling a broader dissemination of ?nished or on-going novel work and the exchangeof experiences in a multidisciplinary environment. Gesture Workshop 2007 (GW 2007) was the 7th European Gesture Workshop in the GW series initiated in 1996. Since that date, the Gesture Workshops have been held roughly every second year, with fully reviewed proceedings typically published by Springer. GW 2007 was organized by ADETTI at ISCTE-Lisbon University - stitute, during May 23-25, 2007. In GW 2007, from the 53 contributions that were received, 15 high-quality full papers were accepted, along with 16 short papers and 10 posters and demos, showing on-going promising gesture research. Two brilliant keynote speakers honored the event with their presentations.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Gesture in Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation, GW 2005, held in May 2005. The 22 revised long papers and 14 revised short papers presented together with 2 invited lectures were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on human perception and production of gesture, sign language representation, sign language recognition, vision-based gesture recognition, gesture analysis, gesture synthesis, gesture and music, and gesture interaction in multimodal systems.

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.