A New Writing Experience: Finger Writing in the Air Using a Kinect Sensor

With the introduction of Microsoft Kinect, there has been considerable interest in creating various attractive and feasible applications in related research fields. Kinect simultaneously captures the depth and color information and provides real-time reliable 3D full-body human-pose reconstruction that essentially turns the human body into a controller. This article presents a finger-writing system that recognizes characters written in the air without the need for an extra handheld device. This application adaptively merges depth, skin, and background models for the hand segmentation to overcome the limitations of the individual models, such as hand-face overlapping problems and the depth-color nonsynchronization. The writing fingertip is detected by a new real-time dual-mode switching method. The recognition accuracy rate is greater than 90 percent for the first five candidates of Chinese characters, English characters, and numbers.