Hand gesture recognition using convexity hull defects to control an industrial robot

This paper presents a method for hand gesture recognition to control a 6 axis industrial robot. The image is acquired by means of a web cam system, and undergoes several processing stages before a meaningful recognition can be achieved. Some of these stages include skin detection to effectively capture only the skin region of the hand, noise elimination, application of the convex hull algorithm to get the outline of the hand, and apply convexity hull defects algorithm to determine the finger count. Once the finger count has been determined, the information is transmitted via serial communication to the industrial robot controller. The end effector of the robot moves in four different directions based on the finger count input received from the hand gesture recognition module.