Left and right hand distinction for multi-touch tabletop interactions

In multi-touch interactive systems, it is of great significance to distinguish which hand of the user is touching the surface in real time. Left-right hand distinction is essential for recognizing the multi-finger gestures and further fully exploring the potential of bimanual interaction. However, left-right hand distinction is beyond the capability of most existing multi-touch systems. In this paper, we present a new method for left and right hand distinction based on the human anatomy, work area, finger orientation and finger position. Considering the ergonomics principles of gesture designing, the body-forearm triangle model was proposed. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm was introduced to group multi-touch contact points and then made left-right hand distinction. A dataset of 2880 images has been set up to evaluate the proposed left-right hand distinction method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can guarantee the high recognition accuracy and real time performance in freely bimanual multi-touch interactions.