Hand pose recovery with a single video camera

We present a system to determine human hand pose from a single monochrome image in real-time. We formulate the hand pose problem as determining the position and orientation of the palm as well as the joint angles of the fingers. The 3D pose of the palm and each joint angle are computed simultaneously using feature points on the human hand. We exploit an existing fast object pose algorithm developed by DeMenthon and Davis (1995) together with a heuristic minimization of a 1D function. We make use of a special glove to remove noise caused by the deformation of the hand and to help find correspondence between 3D object points and their images. We demonstrate our system by using a mock-up cardboard hand with one finger. Experimental results with a real human hand wearing the special glove are presented.