Real-time 3D Hand Posture Reconstruction using Stereo Vision

One of the important goals in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is designing better and more intuitive interfaces for improving the interactions. There are lots of approaches to address this problem. One of these approaches is utilizing human hand gestures. The degree of freedom and complex structure of human hand however, make capturing and modeling of hand gestures a challenging problem. In this paper, an inexpensive, fast, and effective method is proposed to capture 3D hand postures and gestures. An articulated 3D hand model capable of incorporating anatomical restrictions is designed. Five markers with different colors are utilized to indicate the location of finger tips in the images. The proposed method, starting with the stereo calibration of the cameras, performs capturing and tracking the color markers attached to the finger tips, reconstructing the 3D coordinates of these points, and calculating the finger articulations by applying inverse kinematics to the developed 3D hand model. The hand posture reconstruction is performed in real-time.