Towards the automatic definition of the objective function for model-based 3d hand tracking

Abstract

Recently, model-based approaches have produced very promising results to the problems of 3D hand tracking. The current state of the art method recovers the 3D position, orientation and 20 DOF articulation of a human hand from markerless visual observations obtained by an RGB-D sensor. Hand pose estimation is formulated as an optimization problem, seeking for the hand model parameters that minimize an objective function that quantifies the discrepancy between the appearance of hand hypotheses and the actual hand observation. The design of such a function is a complicated process that requires a lot of prior experience with the problem. In this paper we automate the definition of the objective function in such optimization problems. First, a set of relevant, candidate image features is computed. Then, given synthetic data sets with ground truth information, regression analysis is used to combine these features in an objective function that seeks to maximize optimization performance. Extensive experiments study the performance of the proposed approach based on various dataset generation strategies and feature selection techniques.