Patent attributes
In the field of Human-computer interaction (HCI), i.e., the study of the interfaces between people (i.e., users) and computers, understanding the intentions and desires of how the user wishes to interact with the computer is a very important problem. The ability to understand human gestures, and, in particular, hand gestures, as they relate to HCI, is a very important aspect in understanding the intentions and desires of the user in a wide variety of applications. In this disclosure, a novel system and method for three-dimensional hand tracking using depth sequences is described. Some of the major contributions of the hand tracking system described herein include: 1.) a robust hand detector that is invariant to scene background changes; 2.) a bi-directional tracking algorithm that prevents detected hands from always drifting closer to the front of the scene (i.e., forward along the z-axis of the scene); and 3.) various hand verification heuristics.