Precise pointing target recognition for human-robot interaction

This work presents a person independent pointing gesture recognition application. It uses simple but effective features for the robust tracking of the head and the hand of the user in an undefined environment. The application is able to detect if the tracking is lost and can be reinitialized automatically. The pointing gesture recognition accuracy is improved by the proposed fingertip detection algorithm and by the detection of the width of the face. The experimental evaluation with eight different subjects shows that the overall average pointing gesture recognition rate of the system for distances up to 250 cm (head to pointing target) is 86.63% (with a distance between objects of 23 cm). Considering just frontal pointing gestures for distances up to 250 cm the gesture recognition rate is 90.97% and for distances up to 194 cm even 95.31%. The average error angle is 7.28◦