Estimation of the fundamental matrix from uncalibrated stereo hand images for 3D hand gesture recognition

All 3D hand models employed for hand gesture recognition so far use kinematic models of the hand. We propose to use computer vision models of the hand, and recover hand gestures using 3D reconstruction techniques. In this paper, we present a new method to estimate the epipolar geometry between two uncalibrated cameras from stereo hand images. We first segmented hand images using the RCE neural network based color segmentation algorithm and extracted edge points of fingers as points of interest, then match them based on the topological features of the hand. The fundamental matrix is estimated using a combination of techniques such as input data normalization, rank-2 constraint, linear criterion, nonlinear criterion as well as M-estimator. This method has been tested with real calibrated and uncalibrated images. The experimental comparison demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the method. (C) 2002 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.