Hand pose estimation for vision-based human interface

This paper proposes a novel method for hand pose estimation that can be used for vision-based human interfaces. The aim of the method is to estimate all joint angles to manipulate an object in the virtual space. In this method, the hand regions are extracted from multiple images obtained by the multi-viewpoint camera system. By integrating these multi-viewpoint silhouette images, a hand pose is reconstructed as a "voxel model". Then all joint angles are estimated using three dimensional model fitting between hand model and voxel model. An experiment was performed in which the joint angles were estimated from the silhouette images by the hand-pose simulator. The experimental result indicates the feasibility of the proposed algorithm for vision-based interfaces.