Model-based 3D tracking of an articulated hand

This paper presents a practical technique for model-based 3D hand tracking. An anatomically accurate hand model is built from truncated quadrics. This allows for the generation of 2D profiles of the model using elegant tools from projective geometry, and for an efficient method to handle self-occlusion. The pose of the hand model is estimated with an Unscented Kalman filter (UKF), which minimizes the geometric error between the profiles and edges extracted from the images. The use of the UKF permits higher frame rates than more sophisticated estimation methods such as particle filtering, whilst providing higher accuracy than the extended Kalman filter The system is easily scalable from single to multiple views, and from rigid to articulated models. First experiments on real data using one and two cameras demonstrate the quality of the proposed method for tracking a 7 DOF hand model.