This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Gesture and Sign Languages Based Human-Computer Interaction, GW 2003, held in Genova, Italy in April 2003.The 51 revised papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundational issues, gesture tracking, gesture recognition, gesture notation and synthesis, multimodal gestural interfaces, and gestures in multimedia and performing arts.