HAND GESTURE RECOGNITION THROUGH ON-LINE SKELETONIZATION Application of Continuous Skeleton to Real-time Shape Analysis

New method for palm shape analysis and hand gesture recognition with help of continuous skeletons is presented in the paper. Continuous skeleton makes possible to develop fast and simple methods for palm shape analysis and measure a lot of its features. In particular it is possible to develop efficient methods for segmentation and analysis of the object topological structure, measuring relative location of object parts and measuring width of the object in arbitrary place. Applying to palm shape analysis skeleton provides a way to determine number of visible fingers, estimate their thickness and location, and perform efficient palm shape comparison with the sample. Moreover proposed approach allows measuring all mentioned features regardless of palm orientation in the frame. And efficient algorithms for skeleton construction allow performing shape analysis with high speed in real-time applications.