Fingertip-based Real Time Tracking and Gesture Recognition for Natural User Interfaces

The widespread deployment of Natural User Interface (NUI) systems in smart terminals such as phones, tablets and TV sets has heightened the need for robust multitouch, speech or facial recognition solutions. Air gestures recognition represents one of the most appealing technologies in the field. This work proposes a fingertip-based approach for hand gesture recognition. The novelty in the proposed system is the tracking principle, where an improved version of the multi-scale mode filtering (MSMF) algorithm is used, and in the classification step, where the proposed set of geometric features provides high discriminative capabilities. Empirically, we conducted an experimental study involving hand gesture recognition – on gestures performed by multiple persons against a variety of backgrounds – in which our approach achieved a global recognition rate of 95.66%.