Precise Pointing Direction Estimation using Depth Data

Abstract

Pointing direction estimation(PDE) is an important component of many Human Computer Interaction(HCI) applications such as human robot interaction, virtual reality, home automation, driver assistance systems etc. Existing vision based methods using only RGB data need multi-camera setup and are prone to problems due to variation in illumination and in skin color. Depth based techniques mostly use multiple body parts like head, shoulder etc. This imposes restriction on the user location and orientation w.r.t. camera. The only depth based method which uses only the hand region is restricted to a table top scenario and a small range of angles. To circumvent the above problems we propose a depth data based PDE technique that uses only the hand region and is better than existing techniques in terms of range of angles and robustness to variation of depth of the hand w.r.t. the camera while returning an accuracy that is comparable to existing techniques.