3D Hand Pose Tracking and Estimation Using Stereo Matching
This addresses hand pose tracking for human-computer interaction in outdoor and mobile environments where active sensors are unsuitable.
This paper tackles 3D hand pose tracking using passive stereo instead of active depth sensors to overcome interference and power limitations, demonstrating comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods with active sensors across challenging scenarios.
3D hand pose tracking/estimation will be very important in the next generation of human-computer interaction. Most of the currently available algorithms rely on low-cost active depth sensors. However, these sensors can be easily interfered by other active sources and require relatively high power consumption. As a result, they are currently not suitable for outdoor environments and mobile devices. This paper aims at tracking/estimating hand poses using passive stereo which avoids these limitations. A benchmark with 18,000 stereo image pairs and 18,000 depth images captured from different scenarios and the ground-truth 3D positions of palm and finger joints (obtained from the manual label) is thus proposed. This paper demonstrates that the performance of the state-of-the art tracking/estimation algorithms can be maintained with most stereo matching algorithms on the proposed benchmark, as long as the hand segmentation is correct. As a result, a novel stereo-based hand segmentation algorithm specially designed for hand tracking/estimation is proposed. The quantitative evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is suitable for the state-of-the-art hand pose tracking/estimation algorithms and the tracking quality is comparable to the use of active depth sensors under different challenging scenarios.