Gesture was the first mode of communication for the primitive cave men. Later on human civilization has developed the verbal communication very well. But still nonverbal communication has not lost its weightage. Such nonverbal communication are being used not only for the physically challenged people, but also for different applications in diversified areas, such as aviation, surveying, music direction etc. It is the best method to interact with the computer without using other peripheral devices, such as keyboard, mouse. Researchers around the world are actively engaged in development of robust and efficient gesture recognition system, more specially, hand gesture recognition system for various applications. The major steps associated with the hand gesture recognition system are; data acquisition, gesture modeling, feature extraction and hand gesture recognition. There are several sub-steps and methodologies associated with the above steps. Different researchers have followed different algorithm or sometimes have devised their own algorithm. The current research work reviews the work carried out in last twenty years and a brief comparison has been performed to analyze the difficulties encountered by these systems, as well as the limitation. Finally the desired characteristics of a robust and efficient hand gesture recognition system have been described.
General TermsHand gesture recognition, comparison
KeywordsData acquisition, gesture modeling, feature extraction, hand gesture recognition
INTRODUCTIONGesture is a form of non-verbal communication using various body parts, mostly hand and face. Gesture is the oldest method of communication in human. Primitive men used to communicate the information of food/ prey for hunting, source of water, information about their enemy, request for help etc. within themselves through gestures. Still gestures are used widely for different applications on different domains. This includes human-robot interaction, sign language recognition, interactive games, vision-based augmented reality etc. Another major application of gestures is found in the aviation industry for placing the aircraft in the defined bay after landing, for making the passengers aware about the safety features by the airhostess. For communication by the people at a visible, but not audible distance (surveyors) and by the physically challenged people (mainly the deaf and dumb) gesture is the only method. With the advancement of human civilization, the difficulty of interpersonal communication, not only in terms of language, but also in terms of communication between common people and hearing impaired people is gradually being abolished. If development of sign language is the first step, then development of hand recognition system using computer vision is the second step. Several works have been carried out worldwide using Artificial Intelligence for different sign languages.Human-robot interaction [1] is another area where hand gesture recognition has been successfully used. The use of keyboard and mouse...
