Classification of hand postures based on 3D vision model for human-robot interaction

In this paper, a method for hand posture recognition, which is robust for hand posture changing in an actual environment, is proposed. Conventionally, a data glove device and a 3D scanner have been used for the feature extraction of hand shape. However, the performance of each approach is affected by hand posture changing. Therefore, this paper proposes the posture fluctuation model for efficient hand posture recognition, based on 3D hand shape and color feature obtained from a stereo camera. A large set of dictionary for posture recognition is built by various leaned hand images which were auto-created from one scanned hand image, based on plural proposed models. In order to show the effectiveness of proposed method, performance and processing times for posture recognition are compared to conventional method. In addition, we perform the evaluation experiment by using the Japanese sign language.