Hand Tracking and Hand Gesture Recognition for Human Computer Interaction

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the methodology for hand tracking and hand gesture recognition. The detected hand and gesture can be used to implement the non-contact mouse. We had developed a MP3 player using this technology controlling the computer instead of mouse. In this algorithm, we first do a pre-processing to every frame which including lighting compensation and background filtration to reducing the adverse impact on correctness of hand tracking and hand gesture recognition. Secondly, YCbCr skin-color likelihood algorithm is used to detecting the hand area. Then, we used Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift (CAMSHIFT) algorithm to tracking hand. As the formula-based region of interest is square, the hand is closer to rectangular. We have improved the formula of the search window to get a much suitable search window for hand. And then, Support Vector Machines (SVM) algorithm is used for hand gesture recognition. For training the system, we collected 1500 hand gesture pictures of 5 hand gestures. Finally we have performed extensive experiment on a Windows XP system to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed scheme. The hand tracking correct rate is 96% and the hand gestures average correct rate is 95%.