Image processing algorithms for gesture recognition using MATLAB

Gesture recognition is the fast growing field in image processing and artificial technology. The gesture recognition is a process in which the gestures or postures of human body parts are identified and are used to control computers and other electronic appliances. The most contributing reason for the emerging gesture recognition is that they can create a simple communication path between human and computer called HCI (Human Computer Interaction). This paper is confined to identification of hand postures and to establish a man-machine interaction. The hand region in the image is detected and the number of active fingers is determined. In this approach, the input which is an image or a frame from a video can be obtained from web camera or any other camera. This color image is converted into binary image and preprocessed and the number of fingers is counted using scanning method in MATLAB. This is a simple yet efficient approach. The main reason to employ scanning method is to make the code to recognize the finger count independent of size and rotation of the hand.