Constraint-Based Visual Hand Gesture Analysis

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Visual hand/finger tracking and analysis has many important potential applications, including human-computer interaction, rehabilitation, and the recognition of sign languages. The major obstacle to real-time visual hand/finger tracking is the huge dimensionality of the configuration space. E.g., using the finger joint angles to represent the posture, the number of degrees of freedom is about 27. Tracking in this high- dimensional space is computationally impossible. However, finger movement is highly constrained. We propose to use a 3D model-based approach, where the model will include both posture and motion constraints. Tracking is done by matching the image of the real hand and that of the predicted view of the hand from the 3D model. The crux is to use the constraints to reduce the search time. By the end of the proposed period, we expect to have a good constraint representation and a good real-time hand/finger tracking algorithm, and to have demonstrated real-time tracking for the application of virtual object manipulation.