HAND GESTURE RECOGNISTION BASED ON SHAPE PARAMETERS

USING OPEN CV
MANASA SRINIVASA H S
PG Student, ECE Department, DBIT, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Manasasrinivasa89@gmail.com

SURESHA H S
Assoc Professor, ECE Department, DBIT, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Srisuri75@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: Person computer communication (PCC) links people and computer. Persons
communicate with computer in countless ways like desktop applications, internet browsers,
handheld computers and computer kiosks employ graphical user interfaces (GUI) etc. Person
computer interaction uses numerous trendy methods to build up a protected system along with
using mouse and keyboard is mainly well-liked one. But one new technology based on gesture
recognition. Hand gesture recognition enables persons to communicate with the machine. This
project introduces a method for person computer communication by means of opencv. The
projected algorithm consists of preliminary preprocessing of an input image and to find Contour,
Convex-Hull, Convexity defects, Finger tips and palm area of Binary image. The hand gesture
images are taken by camera which is feed as input to the algorithm. The projected algorithm is
able to recognize the number of fingers present in hand gesture

KEYWORDS: Person computer communication, OpenCV, convex-Hull, convexity defects,

Contours, Graphical user interface.

INTRODUCTION

There are many ways of communications to communicate with people or other man created things
like communicating from one person to another person or from person to objects like Desktop, by
means of different kind of gesture recognition. Gesture recognition includes recognition of
different kinds of gestures which means of hands, face and sign language. Sign language is means
of using hand gestures. Most predominant method used to communicate with desktop is using
Keyboards and mouse. But the use of keyboard and mouse in most of the cases includes some area
and cost constraints so only a new method to communicate is use of gesture recognition. Hand
gesture is one kind of communication which is very effective as verbal communication.

Hand gestures convey meaning full information to the opposite persons or other things which is in
the other end .For physically challenged especially persons this kind of hand gesture is very useful
for communication. Many different methods of hand gestures recognition used to communicate
with computer systems or Desktops. Different methods of hand gestures include using number of
sensors called instrumentation gloves or using infrared light called optical makers. Both methods
instrumented gloves and optical makers are complex process and cost effective. This paper aims to
communicate with computer or desktop by means of hand gestures in which different hand
gestures are captured from web camera is the input the projected algorithm. The projected
algorithm includes preliminary pre-processing and to calculate Contour, convex hull and convexity
defects, finger tips and palm area of the binary image and to find out the Number of Fingers which
are up and down

RELATED WORK

Many researchers are going on gesture recognition to adopt new technologies to this world so that
the developing country will may become to developed country in future.Todays trend on touch
screens but by making use of gesture make some more advanced. Some of few research works are
listed below.

In paper [1], Hand gesture recognition technique is used to detect different Hand gestures. The
Hand gesture technique includes three steps which are pre-processing, segmentation and feature
extraction. Pre-processing includes conversion of input image which is an RGB image to Binary
image than the binary image is converted into gray scale image. The gray scale image is threshold
to particular value to find the threshold image .To find gestures of hand make use of contours,
convex hull and convexity defects. Feature extraction includes calculating moments, centroid an
image and Euclidian distance to find the figure counts.

In paper [2], Real time Hand gesture recognition is discussed. Hand gesture based on the shape
parameters like centre of mass, orientation, status of fingers, finger raised or closed .The input
image is taken from the web camera is an RGB image . The background noise is reduced by using
pre-processing steps. To detect the hand image from the background objects uses K-means
clustering method. In this paper Hand image is represented by seven bits. First bit gives the
information about the orientation of the hand. Second bit gives the information about the presence
of thumb in the finger .The three bits gives the information about the fingers raised or closed. The
remaining bits give the information about different verities of gestures which have equal number
of fingers. In this paper the algorithm is implemented in MATLAB.

In paper [3], Gesture recognition for physically impaired is discussed on source of unlike features
like centroid, direction, position of fingers. For background noise reduction some pre processing
steps are included and for segmentation process of an image uses K-means clustering method. To
find the position they make use of bounding box. Hand image with centroid and direction is
detected by Euclidean distance. Here the Hand image is represented by five bits. The 1st bit gives
the information about presence or absence of thumb in the hand gesture. The left bits represent the
remaining four fingers. In this paper the algorithm is implemented in MATLAB.

In paper[4],The input to the algorithm is taken from the camera which is colour image .The colour
image is consists of three channels which is converted to single channel binary image which
consists of 0 and 1.0 for black and 1 for white which is called as black and white image. The
algorithm is uses Edge detection to find out the edges. The orientation of image is finding out by
using edge detection method. The characteristics like centre of mass, peak detection, presence or
absence of finger are used in this paper. Here gesture image is considered with 5 bits to represent
the hand image. For the presence or absence of thumb first bit gives the information. if thumb is
present the bit is 1 otherwise bit is 0. The left out bits gives the information about the remaining
fingers. In this paper the algorithm is implemented in MATLAB.

In paper [5], algorithm for non regular background or 3D complex space is discussed. To
recognise the non regular background of hand gestures HMM based method is used. Here also

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input image is taken by camera and for segmentation process skin tone is used. The different kind
of images is spitted by using spotting algorithm. For the alignment features aligning algorithm is
used.

METHODOLOGY

The input image is taken by camera which is an RGB (Red, green, blue) image.RGB image
consists of three channels with the intensity level for all three channels is 0 to 255.Some
preliminary processing is carried out to convert colour three channel image to binary image which
is single channel image with the intensity level 0to255.Thus converting an input colour image to
binary image is called transformation. The transformed image is then threshold to some threshold
value to get the threshold image. These two steps transformation and thresholding called
segmentation. The main purpose of segmentation step is to segment the hand image from the
background image. After hand segmentation, hand detection steps need to b done to count the
number of fingers. Hand detection step includes Contour, Convex-Hull, Convexity defects, Finger
tips and palm area calculation. The implementation flow diagram is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Implementation flow diagram of hand gesture recognition system.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Hand Segmentation
The input color image is shown in Figure.2. This is captured from the camera. This RGB image is
considered for the whole process of algorithm. The RGB image is transferred to gray scale image.
The gray image is threshold to particular value to get threshold image.

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 Figure 2. Input and gray scale image.
.

Figure 3. Threshold image.

Hand Detection
After Hand Segmentation, with Threshold image as base will detect the hand gesture.Hand
Detection is the second step in hand gesture recognition algorithm. Contour is the first step in hand
detection. The Contour is the sequence of points which are the periphery pixels of a region. A
Hand image and its form of the image is detected and recognised by using contour analysis. After
Contour analysis convex hull is calculated this joins the lines of points which certainly not go over
the contour of hand.

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 Figure 4. Contour and Convex hull image.

CONCLUSION

In this paper the projected algorithm consists of two steps Hand segmentation and Hand detection.
Finally the projected algorithm counts the number of fingers present in the Hand gesture image. In
future it is useful in many applications. Depending on the requirement this method is used.

REFERENCES

Nayana P B, Sanjeev Kubakaddi,Implementation of hand gesture recognition based on shape

parameters using open CV ISSN 2347 - 6435 (Online) Volume 2, Issue 5, May 2014.
Meenakshi Panwar, Hand Gesture Recognition based on Shape Parameters.
Meenakshi Panwar, Hand Gesture based Interface for Aiding Visually Impaired.
Meenakshi Panwar and Pawan Singh Mehra , Hand Gesture Recognition for Human Computer
Interaction, in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Information
Processing(ICIIP 2011), Waknaghat, India, November 2011.
Zhong Yang, Yi Li, Weidong Chen, Yang Zheng, Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition Using
Hidden Markov Models, in Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Computer Science
& Education (ICCSE 2012) July 14-17, 2012. Melbourne, Australia
Amiraj Dhawan, Vipul Honraoimplementation of hand detection based techniques for human
computer interaction, in International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887).

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