Learning Robust Representations with Information Bottleneck and Memory Network for RGB-D-based Gesture Recognition

Although previous RGB-D-based gesture recognition methods have shown promising performance, researchers often overlook the interference of task-irrelevant cues like illumination and background. These unnecessary factors are learned together with the predictive ones by the network and hinder accurate recognition. In this paper, we propose a convenient and analytical framework to learn a robust feature representation that is impervious to gesture-irrelevant factors. Based on the Information Bottleneck theory, two rules of Sufficiency and Compactness are derived to develop a new information-theoretic loss function, which cultivates a more sufficient and compact representation from the feature encoding and mitigates the impact of gesture-irrelevant information. To highlight the predictive information, we further integrate a memory network. Using our proposed content-based and contextual memory addressing scheme, we weaken the nuisances while preserving the task-relevant information, providing guidance for refining the feature representation. Experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrate that our approach leads to a better feature representation and achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods.