WANG et al.: SCWEIGHTED DISPARITY COMPETITION FOR HAND SEGMENTATION 1 Skin Color Weighted Disparity Competition for Hand Segmentation from Stereo Camera

Hand segmentation is the basis of many vision-based hand gesture applications in human computer interaction (HCI). This paper proposes a novel method of skin color weighted disparity competition to incorporate the skin color and depth cues for hand segmentation in clutter environment from stereo camera. The basic idea is that the hand disparity will be apparently different from most of the background disparities. Note that we refer to the scene except the user as the background. The proposed method validates a hand pixel by verifying whether the pixel satisfies the disparity limit of the hand more than of the background. Its novelty lies in incorporating the skin color probability to weight the disparity competition to improve the robustness of validation and the accuracy of boundary location. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.