A fully automatic hand gesture recognition system for human-robot interaction

Abstract

Recently, human - machine interaction (HMI) becomes a hot research topic because of its wide applications, ranging from automatic device control to designing and development of assistant robot or even smart building at sparser scale. One of the most important questions in this research field is finding out an efficient and natural method of HMI. Among several channels of communication, hand gestures have been shown to be an intuitive and efficient mean to express an idea or to control something. For a successful hand gesture based interaction between human and robot, a vocabulary of hand gestures needs to be defined. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a framework to study the behavior of Vietnamese in using of hand gesture in communication with robot. This study allows designing a hand gesture vocabulary for human - robot interaction (HRI) applications. In the literature, there are no works similar to ours. This makes our twofold contributions: (1) a proposed framework for hand gesture recognition: hand gesture vocabulary design, feature extraction for hand posture representation, hand posture classification, and hand gesture database construction; (2) some experimentations are realized to evaluate the defined hand gesture set that can be used in general situation of HRI. The experiment results show that the defined hand gesture set satisfies the both criteria: intuitiveness and recognisability.