A method for controlling wheelchair using hand gesture recognition

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for controlling wheelchair movement using hand gesture recognition. This method was developed based on the curvature of a hand shapes contour. It is simple and has some features to recognize and offers robustness recognizing gestures of one hand. The curvature based hand gesture recognition algorithms recognizes hand gestures using a combination of hand shape contour geometry and calculating the distance from the center of hand to the convex hull on the fingertips. In this paper, this method is able to recognize 5 different hand gestures in same backgrounds for five status movement of wheelchair like as: forward, reverse, left, right and stop. Experiments are presented to show that the wheelchair is able to move and avoid obstacles autonomously while controlled by its user via the hand gesture. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.