Publikation
Fast Hand Detection Using Posture Invariant Constraints
Nils Petersen; Didier Stricker
In: Baerbel Mertsching (Hrsg.). KI 2009: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-2009), 32nd Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, September 15-18, Paderborn, Germany, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer, Berlin, 2009.
Zusammenfassung
The biggest challenge in hand detection and tracking is the high dimensionality of the hand's kinematic configuration space of about 30 degrees of freedom, which leads to a huge variance in its projections. This makes it difficult to come to a tractable model of the hand as a whole. To overcome this problem, we suggest to concentrate on posture invariant local constraints, that exist on finger appearances. We show that, besides skin color, there is a number of additional geometric and photometric invariants. This paper presents a novel approach to real-time hand detection and tracking by selecting local regions that comply with these posture invariants. While most existing methods for hand tracking rely on a color based segmentation as a first preprocessing step, we integrate color cues at the end of our processing chain in a robust manner. We show experimentally that our approach still performs robustly above cluttered background, when using extremely low quality skin color information. With this we can avoid a user- and lighting-specific calibration of skin color before tracking.