Finger tracking

In the field of technology and image processing, finger tracking is a high-resolution technique that is employed to know the consecutive position of the fingers of the user and hence represent objects in 3D. In addition to that, the finger tracking technique is used as a tool of the computer, acting as an external device in our computer, similar to a keyboard and a mouse.

The finger tracking system is focused on user-data interaction, where the user interacts with virtual data, by handling through the fingers the volumetric of a 3D object that we want to represent. This system was born based on the human-computer interaction problem. The objective is to allow the communication between them and the use of gestures and hand movements to be more intuitive, Finger tracking systems have been created. These systems track in real time the position in 3D and 2D of the orientation of the fingers of each marker and use the intuitive hand movements and gestures to interact.

There are many options for the implementation of finger tracking. A great number of theses have been done in this field in order to make a global partition as an objective. We could divide this technique into finger tracking and interface. Regarding the last one, it computes a sequence estimation of the image which detects the hand part of the background. Regarding the first one, to carry out this tracking, we need an intermediate external device, used as a tool for executing different instructions.

In this system we use inertial and optical motion capture systems.

Inertial motion capture systems are able to capture finger motions reading the rotation of each finger segment in 3D space. Applying these rotations to kinematic chain, whole human hand can be tracked in real time, without occlusion and wireless.

Hand inertial motion capture systems, like for example Synertial mocap gloves, are using tiny IMU based sensors, located on each finger segment. For most precise capture, at least 16 sensors have to be used. There are also mocap gloves models with less sensors (13 / 7 sensors) for which the rest of the finger segments is interpolated (proximal segments) or extrapolated (distal segments). The sensors are typically inserted into textile glove which makes the use of the sensors more comfortable.

Because the inertial sensors are capturing movements in all 3 directions, flexion, extensions and abduction can be captured for all fingers and thumb.

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Wikipedia