A Hand Gesture Recognition Library for a 3D Viewer Supported by Kinect’s Depth Sensor

In modern life, human–computer interaction has received the most interest from researchers, especially in developing new interaction methods. Microsoft’s Kinect sensor, which has integrated red-green-blue and depth (RGB+D) cameras, opens up new possibilities As well, many three-dimensional (3D) applications have been developed fashioning the computer world more natural and real for the user. In this paper, we propose and develop a 3D viewer application for heritage, which we call an HT3DViewer, using information received from the RGB+D camera of the Microsoft Kinect sensor. This viewer provides a hand gesture recognition library for users to control the object in the viewer by hands. Hand gestures are detected and defined using tracked information from the Kinect depth camera. The prototype of our hand gesture recognition library and 3D viewer application was built using the Microsoft Kinect software developer’s kit with C# programming language on the Microsoft .NET platform. Moreover, we investigate and select a simple and fast process to generate 3D models of heritage items from 2D images captured by cameras.