Historical Development of Hand Gesture Recognition

P. Premaratne, Human Computer Interaction Using Hand Gestures, Cognitive Science and Technology, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4585-69-9_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014 The history of hand gesture recognition for computer control started with the invention of glove-based control interfaces. Researchers realized that gestures inspired by sign language can be used to offer simple commands for a computer interface. This gradually evolved with the development of much accurate accelerometers, infrared cameras and even fibreoptic bend-sensors (optical goniometers). Some of those developments in glove based systems eventually offered the ability to realize computer vision based recognition without any sensors attached to the glove. These are the coloured gloves or gloves that offer unique colours for finger tracking ability that would be discussed here on computer vision based gesture recognition. Over past 25 years, this evolution has resulted in many successful products that offer total wireless connection with least resistance to the wearer and will be discussed in Chap. 7. This chapter discusses the chronological order of some fundamental approaches that significantly contributed to the expansion of the knowledge of hand gesture recognition.