Fast tracking of hands and fingertips in infrared images for augmented desk interface

Hand landmarks detection and localization in color images

“…Hand landmarks localization is performed in many gesture recognition systems, but usually it is limited to detecting fingertips of extended digits [6,14,17,25,45,54,57], as well as finding the wrist [11,32] and palm region [6,47,51]. This is certainly helpful for estimating a hand pose, when combined with the analysis of some shape features extracted from the hand silhouette or contour.…”

“…The difficulty of hand region extraction heavily depends on the lighting and background conditions imposed during image acquisition, and in many works on gesture recognition a controlled background is assumed [54] or the hand region extraction is simplified using some markers [2]. This step can also be handled using infrared thermal imaging in order to segment a region characterized with the human body temperature [45,46]. Furthermore, a depth sensor or a stereoscopy system may be helpful here, as the skin region is supposed to be positioned close to the camera in the depth map [1,13,43,55].…”

“…Among the methods for estimating a hand pose, there are solutions based on localizing hand landmarks [6,17,45,51,54], extracting hand shape features [36,37,56], or fitting the parameters of a 3D hand model [15,49,59]. In the last case, subspace learning (linear [15] or non-linear [59]) is applied so as to improve the searching process in a large database of hand images obtained from the model.…”

“…Introduction of the Kinect sensor has greatly improved the capacities of gesture recognition [29-31, 42, 52], however in order to increase the accessibility of touchless interfaces, more effective solutions based on computer vision would help in taking advantage of large popularity and low price inherent to standard 2D cameras. The vision-based systems [6,8,14,17,25,32,37,45,47,49,51,54,56,57,59] still do not allow for recognizing the gestures with sufficient accuracy, which brings the need for developing new image analysis algorithms for gesture recognition. One of the major problems here, addressed in this paper, is concerned with detecting and localizing hand landmarks, such as fingertips, joints, or phalanges.…”

EnhancedTable: An Augmented Table System for Supporting Face-to-Face Meeting in Ubiquitous Environment

“…We previously developed a vision-based augmented desk system named EnhancedDesk [5]. In this project, we developed a method for real-time finger recognition [12] and a method for interactive object registration and recognition based on color information [9]. Our system, however, was designed to be used by a single user like other augmented desk systems [1,6,8,21].…”