Hand Pose Recognition — Overview and Current Research

Vision-based markerless hand tracking has many applications, for instance in virtual prototyping, navigation in virtual environments, tele- and robot-surgery and video games. It is a very challenging task, due to the real-time requirements, 26 degrees-of-freedom, high appearance variability, and frequent self-occlusions. Because of that, and because of the many desirable applications, it has received increasing attention in the computer vision community of the past years. A lot of approaches have been proposed to (partially) solve the problem, but no system has been presented yet that can solve the full-DOF hand pose estimation problem robustly in real-time. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the approaches that have been presented so far and where future research of hand tracking probably will go. First, we will explain the challenges in more detail. Second, we will classify the approaches; third, we will describe the most important approaches, and finally we will show the future directions and give a short overview of our current work.