Real-Time Recognition Method of Counting Fingers for Natural User Interface

Communication occurs through verbal elements, which usually involve language, as well as non-verbal elements such as facial expressions, eye contact, and gestures. In particular, among these non-verbal elements, gestures are symbolic representations of physical, vocal, and emotional behaviors. This means that gestures can be signals toward a target or expressions of internal psychological processes, rather than simply movements of the body or hands. Moreover, gestures with such properties have been the focus of much research for a new interface in the NUI/NUX field. In this paper, we propose a method for recognizing the number of fingers and detecting the hand region based on the depth information and geometric features of the hand for application to an NUI/NUX. The hand region is detected by using depth information provided by the Kinect system, and the number of fingers is identified by comparing the distance between the contour and the center of the hand region. The contour is detected using the Suzuki85 algorithm, and the number of fingers is calculated by detecting the finger tips in a location at the maximum distance to compare the distances between three consecutive dots in the contour and the center point of the hand. The average recognition rate for the number of fingers is 98.6%, and the execution time is 0.065 ms for the algorithm used in the proposed method. Although this method is fast and its complexity is low, it shows a higher recognition rate and faster recognition speed than other methods. As an application example of the proposed method, this paper explains a Secret Door that recognizes a password by recognizing the number of fingers held up by a user.