Fujitsu Laboratories and Fujitsu R&D Center today announced the development of 3D hand gesture recognition technology that, using video captured on a single PC or tablet camera, can detect not only vertical and horizontal hand motion, but also the forward and backward movements of increasing or decreasing distance of a hand from the display. With existing hand gesture recognition technology it has been possible to detect hand motions along the vertical and horizontal axes, which represent operations similar to moving a mouse cursor. However, detecting forward and backward hand motions—changing distance to perform the same function as a mouse click—has proven difficult.
The new technology makes it possible to use hand gestures to perform a host of complex operations. For instance, a user can wave his or her hand up and down to make a menu selection on a PC and then confirm the selection with a “push” gesture, even from a distance. Maps and other images can also be expanded or shrunk with “push” and “pull” gestures. Details of the new technology will be announced at the International Conference on Machine Vision Applications (MVA) 2013, to be held starting May 20 at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan.
