Vision-Based Interpretation of Hand Gestures for Remote Control of a Computer Mouse

This paper presents a vision-based interface for controlling a computer mouse via 2D and 3D hand gestures. The proposed interface builds upon our previous work that permits the detection and tracking of multiple hands that can move freely in the field of view of a potentially moving camera system. Dependable hand tracking, combined with fingertip detection, facilitates the definition of simple and, therefore, robustly interpretable vocabularies of hand gestures that are subsequently used to enable a human operator convey control information to a computer system. Two such vocabularies are defined, implemented and validated. The first one depends only on 2D hand tracking results while the second also makes use of 3D information. As confirmed by several experiments, the proposed interface achieves accurate mouse positioning, smooth cursor movement and reliable recognition of gestures activating button events. Owing to these properties, our interface can be used as a virtual mouse for controlling any Windows application.