A robust and parallel-friendly distance image based hand detection

Hand detection plays an important role in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Most of the existing hand detection methods rely on the contour shape of hand after skin color segmentation. Such contour shape based approaches, however, are easily distorted by noises and other skin color segments. In this paper, we present a distance image based approach using CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed distance image based hand detection is robust and fast, reaching up to 97.32% palm detection rate where 80.36% of cases have more than 3 fingers detected on commodity processors. We also achieved 5.0 times speed-up for 320×240 images, and 17.5 times for 640×480 images.