Hand Posture Recognition Using Adaboost with SIFT for Human Robot Interaction

Hand posture understanding is essential to human robot interaction. The existing hand detection approaches using a Viola-Jones detector have two fundamental issues, the degraded performance due to background noise in training images and the in-plane rotation variant detection. In this paper, a hand posture recognition system using the discrete Adaboost learning algorithm with Lowe’s scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) features is proposed to tackle these issues simultaneously. In addition, we apply a sharing feature concept to increase the accuracy of multi-class hand posture recognition. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach successfully recognizes three hand posture classes and can deal with the background noise issues. Our detector is in-plane rotation invariant, and achieves satisfactory multi-view hand detection.