A Fingertip Extraction Method and Its Application to Handwritten Alphanumeric Characters Recognition

In this paper, the camera is utilized to input characters as it becomes standard equipment in most IT products. The tip of forefinger acts like the pen tip is used to write characters in front of the camera. The finger tip is extracted and the tracked trail is recorded as the handwritten character. A character recognition system based on on-line character model is also developed to verify its practical usage. In experiments, each character is written five times by five individuals. The forefinger tip can be used as an input device and integrated with MS-Windows. The fingertip tracking accuracy is 98.58% and the processing speed could reach 13.2 fps. The character recognition rate is 91.11% if confusing character set is included. It demonstrated the feasibility of proposed finger tip extraction method and its application.