Visual Hand Gesture Interface for Computer Board Game Control

In computer vision interface for interactive computer game, gestures can be used as commands for the game control instead of keyboard or mouse. The utilization of hand gesture in human-computer interaction enables human operators to interact with computer environments in a natural and intuitive manner. This paper proposes visual gesture recognition for manipulating objects in a board game such as chess. The distance between a player´s thumb and index finger is used to determine whether the player is in the state of holding a playing object or not. A hand holding an object is tracked until it is stopped and put down the object by widening the distance between the thumb and the finger. The thumb-index distance is measured using the distance between two consecutive peaks of hand contour. The Kalman-filter-based prediction is applied for tracking the finger. The results show high accuracy in objecting picking, hand tracking, and object placing