Finger Tracking for Gestural Interaction in Mobile Devices

In this paper we propose a finger tracking system that is suitable for gesture recognition in mobile devices. The initialisation of the system does not require the use of any I/O devices. The user covers the camera lense with his or her hand and then takes it to the operating distance. The statistical models used for hand segmentation are initialised from the first frames after the hand is removed from the lense. The hand segmentation does not need to be perfect because we do not use the hand contour in the recognition. In our method the fingertips are found using template matching. However, the template matching produces false detections. These false detections are pruned by searching a path from the fingertip to the estimated hand centre and discarding the paths that do not meet a predefined criteria. We evaluate the performance of the method against a fingertip detector proposed by Baldauf et al. [2] by using seven test subjects who initialise the system and then wave their hand in front of the camera. In testing we use one handheld USB camera that matches the image quality of most recent front cameras in mobile phones.