• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.12
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• pp.780-788
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• 2008

Modeling hand poses and tracking its movement are one of the challenging problems in computer vision. There are two typical approaches for the reconstruction of hand poses in 3D, depending on the number of cameras from which images are captured. One is to capture images from multiple cameras or a stereo camera. The other is to capture images from a single camera. The former approach is relatively limited, because of the environmental constraints for setting up multiple cameras. In this paper we propose a method of reconstructing 3D hand poses from a 2D input image sequence captured from a single camera by means of Belief Propagation in a graphical model and recognizing a finger clicking motion using a hidden Markov model. We define a graphical model with hidden nodes representing joints of a hand, and observable nodes with the features extracted from a 2D input image sequence. To track hand poses in 3D, we use a Belief Propagation algorithm, which provides a robust and unified framework for inference in a graphical model. From the estimated 3D hand pose we extract the information for each finger's motion, which is then fed into a hidden Markov model. To recognize natural finger actions, we consider the movements of all the fingers to recognize a single finger's action. We applied the proposed method to a virtual keypad system and the result showed a high recognition rate of 94.66% with 300 test data.