Earticle

Aiming at the problems that current skin-color detection segmentation technologies have unsatisfied segmentation results under conditions of complex illumination or backgrounds, we present a new method based on YCbCr color space and K-means clustering algorithm for segmentation hand gesture. Firstly, image in RGB color space is converted to YCbCr color space; and then YCbCr color space of image is divided into luminance Y and chrominance Cb and Cr. Lastly, the binary image is achieved by clustering values of chrominance using k-means clustering algorithm, and hand gesture segmentation is completed by conducting morphological process of binary image obtained. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method can segment hand gestures from complex backgrounds and obtain segmentation results. The phenomena of similar skin color interference and skin color overlapping are solved with this method effectively. In addition, it is robust to illumination condition.

In order to improve the problems of segmentation accuracy and real-time existing in dynamic hand gesture under complex backgrounds, this paper presents a kind of dynamic hand gesture segmentation method based on improved Kalman filter and weighted skin-color model. Firstly, improved Kalman filter is utilized to process hand gesture image of hand gesture video sequences and get rough hand gesture results. Secondly, weighted skin-color model is applied to process rough results of hand gesture segmentation and segment hand gesture. Finally, morphological method is utilized to deal with gesture segmentation result, getting rid of the holes in the hand gesture’s binary image to realize the segmentation of dynamic hand gesture. Experiments show that the proposed method can segment hand gesture from dynamic hand gesture video sequences with complex backgrounds effectively. And the accuracy of hand gesture segmentation is high.

Objective: We introduce a hand gesture segmentation method using a wrist-worn wearable device which can recognize simple gestures of clenching and unclenching ones' fist. Background: There are many types of smart watches and fitness bands in the markets. And most of them already adopt a gesture interaction to provide ease of use. However, there are many cases in which the malfunction is difficult to distinguish between the user's gesture commands and user's daily life motion. It is needed to develop a simple and clear gesture segmentation method to improve the gesture interaction performance. Method: At first, we defined the gestures of making a fist (start of gesture command) and opening one's fist (end of gesture command) as segmentation gestures to distinguish a gesture. The gestures of clenching and unclenching one's fist are simple and intuitive. And we also designed a single gesture consisting of a set of making a fist, a command gesture, and opening one's fist in order. To detect segmentation gestures at the bottom of the wrist, we used a wrist strap on which an array of infrared sensors (emitters and receivers) were mounted. When a user takes gestures of making a fist and opening one's a fist, this changes the shape of the bottom of the wrist, and simultaneously changes the reflected amount of the infrared light detected by the receiver sensor. Results: An experiment was conducted in order to evaluate gesture segmentation performance. 12 participants took part in the experiment: 10 males, and 2 females with an average age of 38. The recognition rates of the segmentation gestures, clenching and unclenching one's fist, are 99.58% and 100%, respectively. Conclusion: Through the experiment, we have evaluated gesture segmentation performance and its usability. The experimental results show a potential for our suggested segmentation method in the future. Application: The results of this study can be used to develop guidelines to prevent injury in auto workers at mission assembly plants.

Hand gesture recognition is regarded as new Human Computer Interaction (HCI) technologies for the next generation of mobile devices. Previous hand gesture implementation requires a large memory and computation power for hand segmentation, which fails to give real-time interaction with mobile devices to users. Therefore, in this paper, we presents a low latency and memory-efficient hand segmentation architecture for natural hand gesture recognition. To obtain both high memory-efficiency and low latency, we propose a streaming hand contour tracing unit and a fast contour filling unit. As a result, it achieves 7.14 ms latency with only 34.8 KB on-chip memory, which are 1.65 times less latency and 1.68 times less on-chip memory, respectively, compare to the best-in-class.

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.

본 논문에서는 컬러 영상 기반에서 배경에 강인한 피부 영역 검출 기법을 제안하고 손 인식기법을 활용한 응용프로그램을 제안한다. 코드북 모델[1]을 이용하여 배경/전경을 분리하고, 분리된 전경에서 피부색정보를 이용하여 관심영역을 도출한다. 피부 영역을 검출하기 위한 단계에서는 YCbCr, HSV, LUV 색상 모델의 혼합하여 피부색 후보 영역에 대한 임계구간을 통해 강인한 피부 영역을 분할한다. 분할된 영역을 관심영역으로 설정하고 Kalman filter를 이용하여 영역을 추적한다. 결과적으로 복잡하고 고정된 배경에서 조명에 강인한 피부 영역 분할 및 추적이 가능하며 이를 응용한 사용자 인터페이스로 사용될 수 있다.