Vision-Based Hand Gesture Recognition for Human-Computer Interaction

In recent years, research efforts seeking to provide more natural, human-centered means of interacting with computers have gained growing interest. A particularly important direction is that of perceptive user interfaces, where the computer is endowed with perceptive capabilities that allow it to acquire both implicit and explicit information about the user and the environment. Vision has the potential of carrying a wealth of information in a non-intrusive manner and at a low cost, therefore it constitutes a very attractive sensing modality for developing perceptive user interfaces. Proposed approaches for vision-driven interactive user interfaces resort to technologies such as head tracking, face and facial expression recognition, eye tracking and gesture recognition. In this paper, we focus our attention to vision-based recognition of hand gestures. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the current state of the art regarding the recognition of hand gestures as these are observed and recorded by typical video cameras. In order to make the review of the related literature tractable, this paper does not discuss: