Tracking a hand in interaction with an object based on single depth images

Tracking a hand in interaction with an object based on vision is a challenging research topic. The occlusions that occur during the hand-object interaction make it difficult to develop an effective tracking system. To overcome the impacts of occlusions, we build 3D models for both the hand and the manipulated object and propose a model-based tracking method to track the hand and the object simultaneously from single depth images during the hand-object interaction. The most likely hand-object state is searched by an improved particle filtering (PF) tracking algorithm in the high-dimensional hand-object space, which uses Gaussian particle swarm optimization (Gaussian PSO) algorithm to improve the process of particle sampling, moving the particles to the regions with higher likelihood. According to the proposed tracking algorithm, two kinds of hand-object tracking prototype systems are developed by using the graphics rendering engine OSG and off-screen rendering techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can track hand-object motion robustly with few particles.