A User Adaptation Method for Hand Shape Recognition Using Wrist-Mounted Camera

This paper proposes a robust hand segmentation method using view-invariant characteristic of a wrist-mounted camera, and deals with a hand shape recognition system based on segmented hand information. We actively utilize the advantage of the proposed camera device that provides view-invariant images physically, and segment hand region using a Bayesian rule based on adaptive histograms. We construct HSV histograms from RGB histograms, and update HSV histograms using hand region information from a current image. We also propose a user adaptation method by which hand models gradually approach user-dependent models from user-independent models as the user uses the system. The proposed method was evaluated using 16 Korean manual alphabet, and we obtained increases of 27.91% in recognition success rate.