Heuristic and voxel-based signature for hand posture recognition using a range camera

Abstract

To improve the interaction between humans and machines, hand gestures have been a studied alternative for many years. Most of the literature in this area has considered 2D images which cannot provide a full description of the hand gestures due mainly to self occlusion. The objective of the current study is to increase the number of gestures recognizable in real-time while using a 3D signature. An heuristic and voxel-based signature has been designed and implemented. To evaluate the latter, an exhaustive performance analysis including comparison with ground truth and with other well-known features and classifiers was conducted. This study has demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed 3D hand posture signature which leads to 84% recognition rate after testing around 30000 samples of 18 gestures in real-time. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.