Title: 3D hand gesture tracking and recognition for controlling an intelligent wheelchair

Authors: Xiaodong Xu; Yi Zhang; Shuo Zhang; Huosheng Hu

Addresses: School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China ' Engineering Research & Development Centre of Information Accessibility, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China ' Engineering Research & Development Centre of Information Accessibility, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China ' School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK

Abstract: Hand gesture recognition is a user-friendly and intuitive means for human machine interaction. This paper proposes a novel 3D hand gesture recognition method for controlling an intelligent wheelchair based on both colour and depth information. Image depth information of human palm is obtained by a 3D Kinect vision sensor and then its position is obtained through the hand analysis module in OpenNI. The improved Centroid Distance Function is used to extract 3D hand trajectory features, while hidden Markov model (HMM) is applied to train samples and recognise hand gesture trajectories. Finally, the recognition results are converted into control commands through an ad hoc network and sent to an intelligent wheelchair for its motion control. Experiment results show that the proposed method has good invariance to lighting changes, hand rotation and scaling conditions and is very robust to background interference.

Keywords: 3D gesture tracking; HMM; hidden Markov model; pattern recognition; intelligent wheelchairs; hand gestures; wheelchair control; intelligent control; human machine interaction; HMI; colour information; image depth; human palm; vision sensors; centroid distance function; hand trajectories; ad hoc networks; motion control; lighting changes; hand rotation; scaling conditions; background interference.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2014.060521

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2014 Vol.49 No.2, pp.104 - 112

Published online: 02 Mar 2015 *

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