Vision-Based Hand Gesture Tracking and Recognition

T. S. Huang

Electrical and Computer Engineering
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Date: Friday, April 9, 2004
Place: Engineering Pavilion
_____ Engineering II, Rm. 1401
Time: 4:00 pm — 5:00 pm (Refreshments served at 3:30 pm)

Abstract:
We shall present some results of our research on hand tracking and gesture recognition in the last 5 years. This research is motivated by applications in human-computer interaction such as display control in virtual environments and the manipulation of virtual objects. Although we have studied both Appearance-Based and 3D Model-Based approaches, this talk will concentrate on the latter.

At any given time instant, the hand configuration - 6 parameters for the global hand "pose" and 21 finger joint angles (the hand "posture") - is a point in the 27-dimensional configuration space. We track the trajectory of this point over time using a 3D model-based and analysis-by-synthesis approach. The challenge is to represent the constraints on hand posture and finger movement in a compact way and use this representation to speed up the search in the 21-dimensional space. The tracking results can then be used to do gesture recognition. Some preliminary results will be shown on constraint representation and its use in tracking.

THOMAS S. HUANG received his B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, China; and his M.S. and Sc.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was on the Faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT from 1963 to 1973; and on the Faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering and Director of its Laboratory for Information and Signal Processing at Purdue University from 1973 to 1980. In 1980, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is now William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor of Electlrical and Computer Engineering, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Head of the Image Formation and Processing Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and Co-Chair of the Institute's major research theme Human Computer Intelligent Interaction.

During his sabbatical leaves: Dr. Huang has worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and the Rheinishes Landes Museum in Bonn, West Germany, and held visiting Professor positions at the Swiss Institutes of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne, University of Hannover in West Germany, INRS-Telecommunications of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada and University of Tokyo, Japan. He has served as a consultant to numerous industrial firms and government agencies both in the U.S. and abroad.

Dr. Huang's professional interests lie in the broad area of information technology, especially the transmission and processing of multidimensional signals. He has published 12 books, and over 400 papers in Network Theory, Digital Filtering, Image Processing, and Computer Vision. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering; and a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, IEEE, and the Optical Society of America; and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship , an A.V. Humboldt Foundation Senior U.S. Scientist Award , and a Fellowship from the Japan Association for the Promotion of Science . He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Achievement Award in 1987, and the Society Award in 1991. He was awarded the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. Also in 2000, he received the Honda Lifetime Achievement Award for "contributions to motion analysis". In 2001, he received the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Medal. In 2002, he received the King-Sun Fu Prize of the Intenational Association for Pattern Recognition.

He is a Founding Editor of the International Journal Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing; and Editor of the Springer Series in Information Sciences, published by Springer Verlag.

Host: B. S. Manjunath, Professor of ECE