Initializing Markerless Tracking Using a Simple Hand Gesture

We introduce a technique to establish a coordinate system for augmented reality (AR) on tabletop environments. A user's hand is tracked and the fingertips on the outstretched hand are detected, providing a camera pose estimation relative to the hand. As a user places the hand on the surface of a tabletop environment, the hand's coordinate system is propagated to the environment, detecting distinctive image features in the scene. The features are tracked fast and robustly using optical flow. In this way, a new tabletop AR environment is set up without having to carry a marker or a sophisticated tracking system to the environment itself. We also demonstrate a proof-of-concept application for establishing a tabletop AR environment and recognizing a scene when detecting its features.