Hand landmarks detection and localization in color images

This paper introduces a new method for detecting and localizing hand landmarks in 2D color images. Location of the hand landmarks is an important source of information for recognizing hand gestures, effectively exploited in a number of recent methods which operate from the depth maps. However, this problem has not yet been satisfactorily solved for 2D color images. Here, we propose to analyze the skin-presence masks, as well as the directional image of a hand using the distance transform and template matching. This makes it possible to detect the landmarks located both at the contour and inside the hand masks. Moreover, we performed an extensive experimental study to compare the proposed method with a number of state-of-the-art algorithms. The obtained quantitative and qualitative results clearly indicate that our approach outperforms other methods, which may help improve the existing gesture recognition systems.