  This paper addresses the problem of continuous gesture recognition from
sequences of depth maps using convolutional neutral networks (ConvNets). The
proposed method first segments individual gestures from a depth sequence based
on quantity of movement (QOM). For each segmented gesture, an Improved Depth
Motion Map (IDMM), which converts the depth sequence into one image, is
constructed and fed to a ConvNet for recognition. The IDMM effectively encodes
both spatial and temporal information and allows the fine-tuning with existing
ConvNet models for classification without introducing millions of parameters to
learn. The proposed method is evaluated on the Large-scale Continuous Gesture
Recognition of the ChaLearn Looking at People (LAP) challenge 2016. It achieved
the performance of 0.2655 (Mean Jaccard Index) and ranked $3^{rd}$ place in
this challenge.
