Real-time structured light 3D scanning for hand tracking

Hand tracking is widely used in virtual reality systems and it is still a critical problem in computer vision and graphics. In this paper, a structured light scanning based hand tracking system is proposed. The pattern designed in the real-time scanning system is composed of color stripes with quadratic intensity distribution in each stripe. After camera and projector calibration, 3D data of a moving hand can be acquired using the real-time system. For each frame of the sequence, the fingertips are detected by making use of the boundary of the 3D precise data. In comparison with the methods based on passive vision only, the proposed system is more robust and suitable for bare hand tracking. Some experiments have been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.