Virtual Painter Using Hand Gesture Recognition with OpenCV and MediaPipe

This project describes a real-time virtual painter application that incorporates hand gesture recognition using MediaPipe and OpenCV. This application allows users to utilize a standard webcam for hand tracking, enabling them to paint on a digital canvas without requiring any physical input devices. In particular, important hand landmarks like fingers and joints permit activity recognition when users attempt to accomplish "drawing," "erasing," or "changing colors." This project aims to develop a computer vision based interface which accepts hand finger motions as command input for drawing in a digital drawing interface. Using various gestures like the index finger moving simulating drawing motion or erasing gesture using index and middle finger, the user can interact with the application in a straightforward manner. Users can also erase their drawings through gestures that imitate the motion of a real-world eraser. Keywords-Real-time tracking, OpenCV, Mediapipe, Hand Gesture Recognition, Virtual Painter, Touchless Interface, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interactive Applications, Digital Drawing, and Computer Vision