Abstract
A camera-based real-time hand posture and gesture recognition system is proposed for controlling various devices inside automobiles. It uses an imaging system composed of a camera with a proper filter and an infrared lighting device to acquire images of hand-motion sequences. Several steps of pre-processing algorithms are applied, followed by a background normalization process before segmenting the hand from the background. The hand posture is determined by first separating the fingers from the main body of the hand and then by finding the relative position of the fingers from the center of the hand. The beginning and ending of the hand motion from the sequence of the acquired images are detected using pre-defined motion rules to start the hand gesture recognition. A set of carefully designed features is computed and extracted from the raw sequence and is fed into a decision tree-like decision rule for determining the hand gesture. Many experiments are performed to verify the system. In this paper, we show the performance results from tests on the 550 sequences of hand motion images collected from five different individuals to cover the variations among many users of the system in a real-time environment. Among them, 539 sequences are correctly recognized, showing a recognition rate of 98%.
