Approach to hand posture recognition based on hand shape features for human–robot interaction

Hand segmentation is the initial step for hand posture recognition. To reduce the effect of variable illumination in hand segmentation step, a new CbCr-I component Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is proposed to detect the skin region. The hand region is selected as a region of interest from the image using the skin detection technique based on the presented CbCr-I component GMM and a new adaptive threshold. A new hand shape distribution feature described in polar coordinates is proposed to extract hand contour features to solve the false recognition problem in some shape-based methods and effectively recognize the hand posture in cases when different hand postures have the same number of outstretched fingers. A multiclass support vector machine classifier is utilized to recognize the hand posture. Experiments were carried out on our data set to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared with other methods.