Hand gesture animation by key frame extraction

Hand gestures are the universally adopted means of communication with deaf and dumb people throughout the world. By understanding and animating hand gestures, we can help in facilitating communication between computers and the underprivileged. In this paper, we present a method for regenerating original hand gesture sequence with the help of few frames, which are nothing but the key frames. These key frames are extracted using Hu moments. The proposed technique involves the extraction of quantitative description for every sign in the dictionary from a typical gesture sequence representing the sign via calculation of hand parameters for every pose in a gesture sequence. During sign regeneration, a desired hand gesture sequence is created by animating the corresponding key gesture frames with the help of extracted information. For this, the hand models for the frames in between the key frames are obtained by simple interpolation. Experimental results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme for key frame extraction, subsequent gesture summarization and finally gesture animation.