Markerless 3D Hand Posture Estimation from Monocular Video by Two-Level Searching

In this paper, a marker less 3D hand tracking system for monocular RGB video is presented. We propose a novel two-level approach to efficiently grasp the personal characteristics and high varieties of hand postures. Our system first searches the approximate nearest neighbors in a small personalized real-hand image set, and retrieves more details from a large synthetic 3D hand posture database. Temporal consistency property is also utilized for disambiguating and noise reduction. Our prototype system can approximate hand poses including rigid and non-rigid out-of-image-plane rotation, slow and fast gesture changing during rotation. It can also recover from a short-term missing hand situation in an interactive rate.