Estimation of human motion from multiple cameras for gesture recognition

We have been researching human sensing technologies based on computer vision for the realization of the Percept-Room as an intelligent environment. This room offers several services such as the control of electrical appliances by use of gestures. A more caring technology is strongly, expected for providing more human-friendly interfaces. As a first step, the recognition of human motion in the Percept-Room is an important task. We propose a method for extracting humans and then hand gestures from multichannel motion images captured in the Percept-Room. The human position and the rising hand gestures are estimated by integrating the silhouettes from multiple cameras by a background image subtraction and a frame subtraction. We describe the proposed methods and the experimental results obtained by use of a PC system implemented in the Percept-Room.