A Study for Vision Based Data Glove Considering Hidden Fingertip with Self-Occlusion

Data glove is widely used interface device which measures hand posture (finger joint angles) and inputs it into a computer in virtual reality field. But it dose not spread throughout home because of expensive interface. On the other hand, researches to recognize a hand posture from photo/video images are performed, which are a kind of hand posture measurement system and called Vision Based Data Glove (VBDG) in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new VBDG system. It estimates hand motion using detected fingertip positions with monocular camera and inverse kinematics. However it cannot estimate hand motion when a fingertip is undetectable with self-occlusion. So our system estimates hidden finger motion, then estimates hand motion. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can estimate it with sufficient accuracy in real-time. Since camera base system is inexpensive, it fits personal use.