Model-based 3D hand posture estimation from a single 2D image

Passive sensing of the 3D geometric posture of the human hand has been studied extensively over the past decade. However, these research efforts have been hampered by the computational complexity caused by inverse kinematics and 3D reconstruction. In this paper, our objective focuses on 3D hand posture estimation based on a single 2D image. We introduce the human hand model with 27 degrees of freedom (DOFs) and analyze some of its constraints to reduce the 27 to 12 DOFs without any significant degradation of performance. A novel algorithm to estimate the 3D hand posture from eight 2D projected feature points is proposed. Experimental results using real images confirm that our algorithm gives good estimates of the 3D hand pose. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.