Human computer interaction with hand gestures in virtual environment

Abstract

With the ever increasing and flourishing phenomena of growth in virtual environments based upon computer systems; demands for new kind of interaction devices have emerged. The present used devices like keyboard, mouse and pen are cumbrousome within these promising applications. The developments of user interfaces influence the changes in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This paper focuses to design an application using computer vision and gesture recognition techniques which develop a relatively economic input device of interacting with virtual games using hand gestures. The architecture of the gesture recognition system comprises of different image processing techniques like camshift, and Lucas Kanade technique for tracking of hands and its gestures. Haar like features locates the position of the hand and recognizes the gesture being made by such located hand image. The modeling of gestures has been done for recognition through matching the feature of defects present in the hand with the assigned gestures. The virtual game is created using Open GL library. The application uses seven gestures for manipulating the virtual game. This main connotation of this hand gesture recognition system is providing a substitute for input devices while making interaction during the virtual games. Hence instead of making effort to develop a new vocabulary of hand gesture we have matched control instruction set of mouse to subset of most discriminating hand gestures, so that we get a robust interface. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.