Hands and Arms Motion Estimation of a Car Driver with Depth Image Sensor by Using Particle Filter

Abstract

Estimation of hands and arms motion in a car driving by utilizing a depth image sensor, specifically, KINECT of Microsoft Xbox 360, has been proposed. Compared with conventional researches using ordinary vision sensor, depth sensor provides rich information for the hands and arms in the scene. Especially, arms’ regions detected by the depth sensor have been utilized to estimate the hands and arms motion more accurately than the conventional researches. As well as the increasing accuracy of the hands and arms region extraction, this paper proposes to incorporate some particles intentionally switching the left and the right of the hands in a framework of particle filter. This idea reduce the mistaken (opposite) determination of left and right and it will increase the opportunity to recover automatically from the opposite determination. Experiments over the recorded videos of vision and depth under a driving simulator environment show the efficiency of the proposed method.