Model-based visual hand posture tracking for guiding a dexterous robotic hand

Visual hand gesture based interfaces have been widely used for navigation of virtual environments and control of a robot arm in robotic systems. In fact, hand movement has abundant powers of expression with complex finger joint motions. In this paper, the full degree-of-freedom hand motion is tracked in a vision-based mode towards natural and intuitive control of a dexterous robotic hand. The main obstacle to handle human hand posture tracking is the high dimensionality. A novel three-dimensional model-based approach is proposed. It utilizes a genetic algorithm-based global optimization procedure after each particle-filtering step, which deals with the tracking in high-dimensional and multi-modal state space reasonably well. Experimental results show that present approach improves performance of hand posture tracking significantly and provides a feasible solution for guiding a dexterous hand. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 42.30.T; 07.05.T; 42.30.W