Hand Gesture Recognition Using Local Histogram Feature Descriptor

Abstract

Hand gesture recognition system is widely used in the development of human-computer interaction. The vision based hand gesture recognition is achieved by the following steps: preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. The aim of preprocessing stage is to localize the hand region from the image frame. The Laplacian of Gaussian filtering technique along with zero crossing detector is applied on hand gesture images to detect the edges of hand region. This paper proposes a novel feature extraction technique, which is based on local histogram feature descriptor (LHFD). The proposed feature is extracted by finding the local histogram of the gray scale gesture image. This technique uses the whole region of the hand to extract the features. The proposed method is invariant to the scaling and illumination. Two standard datasets viz. Massey University gesture dataset (MUGD) and Jochen Triesch static hand posture database are used to evaluate the recognition performance of the proposed technique. The gesture recognition performance of the proposed technique is 99.5% and 95% on Massey University gesture dataset and Triesch dataset respectively, using multi-class support vector machine (SVM) classifier.