Recognizing Hand Gestures

James W. Davis, Mubarak Shah

Abstract: This paper presents a method for recognizing human-hand gestures using a model-based approach. A Finite State Machine is used to model four qualitatively distinct phases of a generic gesture. Fingertips are tracked in multiple frames to compute motion trajectories, which are then used for finding the start and stop position of the gesture. Gestures are represented as a list of vectors and are then matched to stored gesture vector models using table lookup based on vector displacements. Results are presented showing recognition of seven gestures using images sampled at 4 Hz on a SPARC-1 without any special hardware. The seven gestures are representatives for actions of Left, Right, Up, Down, Grab, Rotate, and Stop.