Real Time Fingertip Detection with Kinect Depth Image Sequences

Gesture recognition has been a research focus with the popularity of depth sensing device. In this paper, we propose a new fingertip detection method based on a novel definition of fingers. This method consists of two steps. Firstly, finger bases are detected and estimated as prior information. Secondly, the finger regions and fingertips are located. In the second module, the point cloud of hand is represented as a graph to obtain all geodesic paths originated from palm center. If one path travels through a finger base, then its terminal point is defined as a finger point. The fingertips are determined within these finger points by utilizing geodesic distances. To our knowledge, such definition has never been applied in gesture recognition before and its performance surpasses the definition of geodesic maxima. Experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of our method even when hand is not parallel to camera. Compared with state-of-the-art approach, our method shows much less error.