A Fast Algorithm for Vision-Based Hand Gesture Recognition for Robot Control

We propose a fast algorithm for automatically recognizing a limited set of gestures from hand images for a robot control application. Hand gesture recognition is a challenging problem in its general form. We consider a fixed set of manual commands and a reasonably structured environment, and develop a simple, yet effective, procedure for gesture recognition. Our approach contains steps for segmenting the hand region, locating the fingers, and finally classifying the gesture. The algorithm is invariant to translation, rotation, and scale of the hand. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique on real imagery.