Vision-Based Hand Gesture Recognition System for a Dynamic and Complicated Environment

A vision-based hand gesture recognition system is considered in this paper. Unlike other hand gesture recognition studies, our study considers a complicated background and possible dynamic motion of hands. Thus, instead of using simple background subtraction, in this study, many problems are considered, such as detection of skin color image, detection of when a hand reaches in the field of the camera view and detection of a full palm. The proposed system consists of four stages, detection of the appearance of hands, segmentation of hand regions, detection of full palm, and hand gesture recognition. Detection of the appearance of hands is to find out when a hand appears in the front of the camera. Moreover, some morphological techniques, along with two stage skin color detection, are employed to alleviate the effect of noise. The proposed two-stage skin color detection approach is adopted from the idea of handling outliers to extract the palm from a complicated background. Following that, detection of full palm is conducted to know whether the hand reaches beyond the field of the camera view. The concept of ergonomics is employed to determine whether the hand is beyond the field of the camera view. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed system is quite promising.