An Improved Approach for 3D Hand Pose Estimation Based on a Single Depth Image and Haar Random Forest

A vision-based 3D tracking of articulated human hand is one of the major issues in the applications of human computer interactions and understanding the control of robot hand. This paper presents an improved approach for tracking and recovering the 3D position and orientation of a human hand using the Kinect sensor. The basic idea of the proposed method is to solve an optimization problem that minimizes the discrepancy in 3D shape between an actual hand observed by Kinect and a hypothesized 3D hand model. Since each of the 3D hand pose has 23 degrees of freedom, the hand articulation tracking needs computational excessive burden in minimizing the 3D shape discrepancy between an observed hand and a 3D hand model. For this, we first created a 3D hand model which represents the hand with 17 different parts. Secondly, Random Forest classifier was trained on the synthetic depth images generated by animating the developed 3D hand model, which was then used for Haar-like feature-based classification rather than performing per-pixel classification. Classification results were used for estimating the joint positions for the hand skeleton. Through the experiment, we were able to prove that the proposed method showed improvement rates in hand part recognition and a performance of 20-30 fps. The results confirmed its practical use in classifying hand area and successfully tracked and recovered the 3D hand pose in a real time fashion.