Efficient model-based 3D tracking of hand articulations using Kinect
HOME RESEARCH/DEMOS PROJECTS ACTIVITIES PUBLICATIONS CITATIONS COURSES STUDENTS LINKS RESTRICTED	Dec 2012: FORTH 3D Hand Tracking Library and API is now available under OpenNI 2.0 (MS Windows and Linux versions) Aug 2012: An executable demo version of our Kinect 3D hand tracking software is now available for download Brief description We present a novel solution to the problem of recovering and tracking the 3D position, orientation and full articulation of a human hand from markerless visual observations obtained by a Kinect sensor. We treat this as an optimization problem, seeking for the hand model parameters that minimize the discrepancy between the 3D structure and appearance of hypothesized instances of a hand model and actual hand observations. This optimization problem is effectively solved using a variant of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The proposed method does not require special markers and/or a complex image acquisition setup. Being model based, it provides continuous solutions to the problem of tracking hand articulations. Extensive experiments with a prototype GPU-based implementation of the proposed method demonstrate that accurate and robust 3D tracking of hand articulations can be achieved in near real-time (12Hz). In this work we extend our earlier approach (PEHI) for markerless and efficient 26-DOF hand pose recovery (ACCV 2010). PEHI was a generative, multiview method for 3D hand pose recovery. In the current, new approach, instead of exploiting 2D visual cues extracted from by a multicamera setup we employ 2D and 3D visual cues resulting from a single RGB-D sensor. It turns out that this (a) improves the accuracy of hand tracking (b) reduces the complexity and the cost of the required camera setup (c) improves tolerance in variations of lighting conditions and (d) drastically improves computational performance. · See the extension of this work towards tracking the articulated motion of two strongly interacting hands (CVPR 2012). · You may also be interested in having a look at our related work on full DOF tracking of a hand interacting with an object by modeling occlusions and physical constraints (ICCV'2011), where we do not only seek for the optimal hand model that explains the available hand observations alone, but rather for the joint hand-object model that best explains both the available hand/object observations and the occlusions. Graphical illustration of the proposed method. A Kinect RGB image (a) and the corresponding depth map (b). The hand is segmented (c) by jointly considering skin color and depth. The proposed method fits the employed hand model (d) to this observation recovering the hand articulation (e). Sample results Quantitative evaluation of the performance of the method with respect to (a) the PSO parameters (b) the distance from the sensor (c) noise and (d) viewpoint variation (see paper for details). See a video with sample results on full DOF tracking of articulated hands based on the Kinect. Contributors Iason Oikonomidis, Nikolaos Kyriazis, Pashalis Padeleris, Antonis Argyros. This work was partially supported by the IST-FP7-IP-215821 project GRASP. Relevant publications · I. Oikonomidis, N. Kyriazis and A.A. Argyros, “Efficient model-based 3D tracking of hand articulations using Kinect”, in Proceedings of the 22nd British Machine Vision Conference, BMVC’2011, University of Dundee, UK, Aug. 29-Sep. 1, 2011. · Oikonomidis, N. Kyriazis and A.A. Argyros, “Tracking the articulated motion of two strongly interacting hands”, in the Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2012, Rhode Island, USA, June 18-20, 2012. · I. Oikonomidis, N. Kyriazis and A.A. Argyros, “Markerless and Efficient 26-DOF Hand Pose Recovery”, in Proceedings of the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV’2010, Part III , LNCS 6494, pp. 744–757, Queenstown, New Zealand, Nov. 8-12, 2010. · I. Oikonomidis, N. Kyriazis and A.A. Argyros, “Full DOF tracking of a hand interacting with an object by modeling occlusions and physical constraints”, in Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV’2011, Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 6-13, 2011. · N. Kyriazis, I. Oikonomidis, A.A. Argyros, “A GPU-powered computational framework for efficient 3D model-based vision”, Technical Report TR420, Jul. 2011, ICS-FORTH, 2011. The electronic versions of the above publications can be downloaded from my publications page.
Last update:	04 January 2013, Antonis Argyros, argyros@ics.forth.gr