A Model-Based System for Real-Time Articulated Hand Tracking Using a Simple Data Glove and a Depth Camera

Tracking detailed hand motion is a fundamental research topic in the area of human-computer interaction (HCI) and has been widely studied for decades. Existing solutions with single-model inputs either require tedious calibration, are expensive or lack sufficient robustness and accuracy due to occlusions. In this study, we present a real-time system to reconstruct the exact hand motion by iteratively fitting a triangular mesh model to the absolute measurement of hand from a depth camera under the robust restriction of a simple data glove. We redefine and simplify the function of the data glove to lighten its limitations, i.e., tedious calibration, cumbersome equipment, and hampering movement and keep our system lightweight. For accurate hand tracking, we introduce a new set of degrees of freedom (DoFs), a shape adjustment term for personalizing the triangular mesh model, and an adaptive collision term to prevent self-intersection. For efficiency, we extract a strong pose-space prior to the data glove to narrow the pose searching space. We also present a simplified approach for computing tracking correspondences without the loss of accuracy to reduce computation cost. Quantitative experiments show the comparable or increased accuracy of our system over the state-of-the-art with about 40% improvement in robustness. Besides, our system runs independent of Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) and reaches 40 frames per second (FPS) at about 25% Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage.