Tracking,recognition, and distance detection of hand gestures for a 3‐D interactive display

Abstract— This study proposes an interactive system for displays, the technologies of which consists of three main parts: hand‐gesture tracking, recognition, and depth measurement. The proposed interactive system can be applied to a general 3‐D display. In this interactive system, for hand‐gesture tracking, Haar‐like features are employed to detect a specific hand gesture to start tracking, while the mean‐shift algorithm and Kalman filter are adopted for fast tracking. First, for recognizing hand gestures, a principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm is used to localize colored areas of skin, and then hand gestures are identified by comparison with a prepared database. Second, a simple optical system is set up with an infrared laser source and a grid mask in order to project a proposed horizontal stripe pattern. Third, the projected patterns are deciphered to extract the depth information using the Hough‐transform algorithm. The system containing hand‐gesture localization, recognition, and associated depth detection (the distance between the display and the hand), was included in a prototype of an interactive display. Demonstration of rotation recognition of a finger‐pointing hand gesture was successful by using the algorithm of radar‐like scanning.