Abstract:

Hand gesture is a kind of naturally intuitive interacting ways. Computer visionbased hand gesture recognition has become a key technique in the realization of new humancomputer interaction. On the basis of the existing techniques of hand gesture recognition, this paper proposes a method in the recognition of hand gestures with a single camera from the facts of hand gesture segmentation and representation. The skin area is detected with color features and the hand is segmented successfully; the fingertips are  detected with the hand’s contour and convex defects and then a hand gesture is represented with the number of fingertips and their positions, and therefore, the procedure of recognizing hand gestures is completed with geometric features such as the contour length and the area. The traditional approaches of detecting fingertips the process of retrieving and scanning the palm’s outer contour, resulting in very large computation. However, the paper reduces computation and improves the speed of fingertip detection by detecting the convex defect of fingertips. The experimental results show that the proposed method is robust and realtime, and is able to adapt to the environmental change.

Key words: hand gesture recognition;hand gesture segmentation;fingertip detection;skin detection