EigenNail for Finger Force Direction Recognition

This paper presents a technique termed eigennails to classify fingertip force during contact based on the coloration patterns in the fingernail and surrounding skin. Fingertip force is classified into six directions: no force, normal force only, two directions (left/right) of lateral shear force, and two directions (forward/backward) of longitudinal shear forces. Based on the face recognition technique eigenfaces, a small number of eigennails are sufficient to express the color pattern features for shear force direction classification. Results show that 98% of 960 fingernail images of 8 different subjects are correctly classified. The lowest imaging resolution without sacrificing classification accuracy is found to be 10-by-10.