Hand gesture recognition based on concentric circular scan lines and weighted K-nearest neighbor algorithm

Human-computer interactions based on hand gestures are of the most popular natural interactive modes, which severely depends on real-time hand gesture recognition approaches. In this paper, a simple but effective hand feature extraction method is described, and the corresponding hand gesture recognition method is proposed. First, based on a simple tortoise model, we segment the human hand images by skin color features and tags on the wrist, and normalize them to create the training dataset. Second, feature vectors are computed by drawing concentric circular scan lines (CCSL) according to the center of the palm, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) algorithm is used to deal with those vectors. Last, a weighted k-nearest neighbor (W-KNN) algorithm is presented to achieve real-time hand gesture classification and recognition. Besides the efficiency and effectiveness, we make sure that the whole gesture recognition system can be easily implemented and extended. Experimental results with a user-defined hand gesture dataset and multi-projector display system show the effectiveness and efficiency of the new approach.