Hand Gesture Recognition for Kinect v2 Sensor in the Near Distance Where Depth Data Are Not Provided

Kinect v2 sensor does not provide depth information and skeletal traction function in near distance from the sensor. That is why many researches, to recognize hand gestures, are focused on the skeletal tracking only inside the range of detection. This paper proposes a method which can recognize hand gestures in the distance less than 0.5 meter without conventional skeletal tracking when Kinect v2 sensor is used. The proposed method does not use the information of depth sensor and infrared sensor, but detect hand area and count the number of isolated areas which are generated by drawing a circle in the center of the hand area. This method introduces new detectable gestures without high cost, so that it can be a substitute for the existing mouse-movement controlling and dynamic gesture recognition method such as clicking a mouse, clicking and dragging, rotating an image with two hands, and scaling an image with two hands in near distance. The gestures are appropriate for the user interface of smart devices which employ the interactions based on hand gestures in near distance.