Human Hand Recognition Using IPCA-ICA Algorithm

A human hand recognition system is introduced. First, a simple preprocessing technique which extracts the palm, the four fingers, and the thumb is introduced. Second, the eigenpalm, the eigenfingers, and the eigenthumb features are obtained using a fast incremental principal non-Gaussian directions analysis algorithm, called IPCA-ICA. This algorithm is based on merging sequentially the runs of two algorithms: the principal component analysis (PCA) and the independent component analysis (ICA) algorithms. It computes the principal components of a sequence of image vectors incrementally without estimating the covariance matrix (so covariance-free) and at the same time transforming these principal components to the independent directions that maximize the non-Gaussianity of the source. Third, a classification step in which each feature representation obtained in the previous phase is fed into a simple nearest neighbor classifier. The system was tested on a database of 20 people (100 hand images) and it is compared to other algorithms.