Simultaneous Tracking of Both Hands by Estimation of Erroneous Observations

The articulate motion of the hand makes it very difficult to track the hands while performing a gesture. Simultaneous tracking of both hands needs to deal with large interframe variations in shape, clutter and mutual occlusion. In this paper, we present a robust method for localizing the hand region by tracking even in the presence of severe occlusion. We develop a model for tracking two rectangular windows, each bounding one of the hands, using the condensation algorithm. We propose a new method for dealing with occlu- sions by estimating the occluded observations in terms of the non-occluded observations and their predicted values, yielding very reliable results.