Hand Gesture Recognition using Optical Flow Field Segmentation and Boundary Complexity Comparison based on Hidden Markov Models

Abstract

In this paper, we will present a method to detect human hand and recognize hand gesture. For detecting the hand region, we use the feature of human skin color and hand feature (with boundary complexity) to detect the hand region from the input image; and use algorithm of optical flow to track the hand movement. Hand gesture recognition is composed of two parts: 1. Posture recognition and 2. Motion recognition, for describing the hand posture feature, we employ the Fourier descriptor method because it's rotation invariant. And we employ PCA method to extract the feature among gesture frames sequences. The HMM method will finally be used to recognize these feature to make a final decision of a hand gesture. Through the experiment, we can see that our proposed method can achieve 99% recognition rate at environment with simple background and no face region together, and reduce to 89.5% at the environment with complex background and with face region. These results can illustrate that the proposed algorithm can be applied as a production.