Extraction of hand region and specification of finger tips from color image

The authors propose a new method (Vision Point Out System (VPOS)) of the extraction of the hand region and the specification of the finger tips from a color image. This algorithm uses the product of the skin color information and the brightness information. Even if the input image has nail and complex background, this method can extract the correct hand region. They evaluated the effectiveness of this method for some hand images with the complex background by the computer experiments. This algorithm can find the extended finger, and can classify "Janken (Japanese finger guessing game; Gu-Choki-Pa)". The string region pointed out by the finger on the background can be extracted.