Template-based hand pose recognition using multiple cues

Abstract

This paper presents a practical method for hypothesizing hand locations and subsequently recognizing a discrete number of poses in image sequences. In a typical setting the user is gesturing in front of a single camera and interactively performing gesture input with one hand. The approach is to identify likely hand locations in the image based on discriminative features of colour and motion. A set of exemplar templates is stored in memory and a nearest neighbour classifier is then used for hypothesis verification and pose estimation. The performance of the method is demonstrated on a number of example sequences, including recognition of static hand gestures and a navigation by pointing application. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.