Visual Hand Tracking and Gesture Recognition
Abstract
We shall present some results of our research on hand tracking and gesture
recognition in the last 5 years. This research is motivated by
applications in human-computer interaction such as display control in
virtual environments and the manipulation of virtual objects. Although we
have studied both Appearance- Based and 3D Model-Based approaches, this
talk will concentrate on the latter.
At any given time instant, the hand configuration - 6 parameters for the
global hand "pose" and 21 finger joint angles (the hand "posture") - is a
point the 27-dimensional configuration space. We track the trajectory of
this point over time using a 3D model-based and analysis-by-synthesis
approach. The challenge is to represent the constraints on hand posture
and finger movement in a compact way and use this representation to speed
up the search in the 21-dimensional space. The tracking results can then
be used to do gesture recognition. Some preliminary results will be shown
on constraint representation and its use in tracking.