Region-growing based Hand Segmentation Algorithm using Skin Color and Depth Information

Extracting hand region from images is the first part in the process to recognize hand posture and gesture interaction. Therefore, a good segmenting method is important because it determines the overall performance of hand recognition systems. Conventional hand segmentation researches were prone to changing illumination conditions or limited to the ability to detect multiple people. In this paper, we propose a robust technique based on the fusion of skin-color data and depth information for hand segmentation process. The proposed algorithm uses skin-color data to localize accurate seed location for region-growing from a complicated background. Based on the seed location, our algorithm adjusts each detected blob to fill up the hole region. A region-growing algorithm is applied to the adjusted blob boundary at the detected depth image to obtain a robust hand region against illumination effects. Also, the resulting hand region is used to train our skin-model adaptively which further reduces the effects of changing illumination. We conducted experiments to compare our results with conventional techniques which validates the robustness of the proposed algorithm and in addition we show our method works well even in a counter light condition.