Description of the human hand grasp using graph theory

This paper presents a method to describe and analyze the human hand grasp postures so as to indicate which fingers should act during grasping and the required movements of those fingers. The method first describes the human hand with human hand tree graph and incidence matrix, and then the relationship between the human hand and the grasped object is described by grasp contact graph and basic cycle matrix that can be divided into an identity matrix and a B_f12 matrix. The nonzero columns of the B_f12 matrix can be described by a graph called VF-tree, which can indicate which fingers are active while grasping and the required degree of freedom of each finger. The method is validated by describing and analyzing the six basic grasp postures of the human hand.