Hand-gesture extraction and recognition from the video sequence acquired by a dynamic camera using condensation algorithm

To achieve environments in which humans and mobile robots co-exist, technologies for recognizing hand gestures from the video sequence acquired by a dynamic camera could be useful for human-to-robot interface systems. Most of conventional hand gesture technologies deal with only still camera images. This paper proposes a very simple and stable method for extracting hand motion trajectories based on the Human-Following Local Coordinate System (HFLC System), which is obtained from the located human face and both hands. Then, we apply Condensation Algorithm to the extracted hand trajectories so that the hand motion is recognized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by conducting experiments on 35 kinds of sign language based hand gestures.