OpenCV 4 with Python Blueprints - Second Edition

Understanding hand region segmentation

The automatic detection of an arm—and later, the hand region—could be designed to be arbitrarily complicated, maybe by combining information about the shape and color of an arm or hand. However, using skin color as a determining feature to find hands in visual scenes might fail terribly in poor lighting conditions or when the user is wearing gloves. Instead, we choose to recognize the user's hand by its shape in the depth map.

Allowing hands of all sorts to be present in any region of the image unnecessarily complicates the mission of the present chapter, so we make two simplifying assumptions:

• We will instruct the user of our app to place their hand in front of the center of the screen, orienting their ...