Pointing Angle Estimation for Human-Robot Interface

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an approach to track and estimate user pointing direction in 3D Space. In the area of human-robot interaction, user communicates with service robot in their daily life activities to give commands and execute the given task accordingly. Therefore, the ability of user to gives command to service robot naturally can provide an interactive user interface system for real 3D space environment. For this purpose, we aim to perform pointing gesture tracking and after that estimate the user's pointing direction. Our method of pointing direction estimation is based on 3D orientation of hand and shoulder center of user. We make comparison with our previous method to find the best hypothesis. Experimental results show the angular error for the estimation of pointing direction is successfully improved from our previous method. As a result, our natural user interface system can manipulate 3D objects in living room environment thus providing intuitive robotic service for human robot interaction.