Skin cluster tracking and verification for hand gesture recognition

Device free communication is getting more and more popular. A comfortable and easy way to accomplish this is interaction with hand gestures. A very good gesture recognition system is required in order to avoid frustration among users. The major challenge in hand gesture recognition lies in an accurate segmentation of the hand. The accurate segmentation of skin colored body parts is an active field of research, and much research has been done to solve this segmentation problem with skin models or skin classification rules. In this paper we address hand segmentation and introduce a novel approach based on the extraction, tracking and verification of skin clusters in color space during runtime. An evaluation shows, that our approach performs significantly better than other approaches used for comparison.