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Main Authors: Ali, Hassan, Jirak, Doreen, Müller, Luca, Wermter, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14953
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author Ali, Hassan
Jirak, Doreen
Müller, Luca
Wermter, Stefan
author_facet Ali, Hassan
Jirak, Doreen
Müller, Luca
Wermter, Stefan
contents Gesture recognition research, unlike NLP, continues to face acute data scarcity, with progress constrained by the need for costly human recordings or image processing approaches that cannot generate authentic variability in the gestures themselves. Recent advancements in image-to-video foundation models have enabled the generation of photorealistic, semantically rich videos guided by natural language. These capabilities open up new possibilities for creating effort-free synthetic data, raising the critical question of whether video Generative AI models can augment and complement traditional human-generated gesture data. In this paper, we introduce and analyze prompt-based video generation to construct a realistic deictic gestures dataset and rigorously evaluate its effectiveness for downstream tasks. We propose a data generation pipeline that produces deictic gestures from a small number of reference samples collected from human participants, providing an accessible approach that can be leveraged both within and beyond the machine learning community. Our results demonstrate that the synthetic gestures not only align closely with real ones in terms of visual fidelity but also introduce meaningful variability and novelty that enrich the original data, further supported by superior performance of various deep models using a mixed dataset. These findings highlight that image-to-video techniques, even in their early stages, offer a powerful zero-shot approach to gesture synthesis with clear benefits for downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prompt-to-Gesture: Measuring the Capabilities of Image-to-Video Deictic Gesture Generation
Ali, Hassan
Jirak, Doreen
Müller, Luca
Wermter, Stefan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Gesture recognition research, unlike NLP, continues to face acute data scarcity, with progress constrained by the need for costly human recordings or image processing approaches that cannot generate authentic variability in the gestures themselves. Recent advancements in image-to-video foundation models have enabled the generation of photorealistic, semantically rich videos guided by natural language. These capabilities open up new possibilities for creating effort-free synthetic data, raising the critical question of whether video Generative AI models can augment and complement traditional human-generated gesture data. In this paper, we introduce and analyze prompt-based video generation to construct a realistic deictic gestures dataset and rigorously evaluate its effectiveness for downstream tasks. We propose a data generation pipeline that produces deictic gestures from a small number of reference samples collected from human participants, providing an accessible approach that can be leveraged both within and beyond the machine learning community. Our results demonstrate that the synthetic gestures not only align closely with real ones in terms of visual fidelity but also introduce meaningful variability and novelty that enrich the original data, further supported by superior performance of various deep models using a mixed dataset. These findings highlight that image-to-video techniques, even in their early stages, offer a powerful zero-shot approach to gesture synthesis with clear benefits for downstream tasks.
title Prompt-to-Gesture: Measuring the Capabilities of Image-to-Video Deictic Gesture Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14953