Using Hand Postures for Interacting with Assistant Robot in Library

Visual interpretation of hand gesture for human-system interaction in general and human-robot interaction in particular is becoming a hot topic in computer vision and robotics fields. Hand gestures provide very intuitive and efficient means and enhance the flexibility in communication. Even a number of works have been proposed for hand gesture recognition, the use of these works for real human-robot interaction is still limited. Based on our previous works for hand detection and hand gesture recognition, we have built a fully automatic hand gesture recognition system and have applied it in a human-robot interaction application: service robot in library. In this paper, we describe in detail this application from the user requirement analysis to system deployment and experiments with end-users.