This is a Research project (Forschungsprojekt) at the HTW Berlin. The main task is to recognize short-time gestures in a video.
The project is still underway, so it has performance issues.
It uses the OpenCV framework, which must be installed in order to test/use the code. Get it here: http://opencv.org
The OpenCV version has to be 2.4.X, because the developers have cut the support for HOG descriptors in the CascadeClassifier in the later versions.
The code was tested on Windows 7 and MacOS 10.8.X.