Patent ID: 9330308
Filing Date: 2016-05-03
CPC Classification: G06K

Claim Text:
1. An apparatus for recognizing a user's gesture for carrying out an operation of a vehicle, comprising: an image generator configured to generate an object image by photographing a user's hand; a feature point candidate detector configured to generate a hand image including a hand region by eliminating a background of the object image, and detect a center point of a wrist and feature point candidates including fingertips and finger valleys, wherein the feature point candidate detector detects an outline of the user's hand, and detects the fingertips or the finger valleys based on a curvature of the outline of the user's hand; a palm detector configured to detect a palm region by performing a morphology operation on the hand region, and detect a center point of the palm region, wherein the palm detector performs an erosion operation along the outline of the user's hand to eliminate the finger region, performs a dilation operation along an outline of the palm region remaining after being partially eliminated by the erosion operation to dilate the palm region, and detects a center point of the dilated palm region by using an ellipse matching method or a least squares method; a finger detector configured to detect a finger region by eliminating the palm region from the hand region; a feature point detector configured to detect the finger valleys located within the palm region and the fingertips located within the finger region as feature points, and generate a hand model by using the center point of the wrist, the center point of the palm region, and the feature points; and a gesture recognizer configured to recognize a number of unfolded fingers based on the hand model, and recognize the user's gesture by selecting a category that corresponds to the number of unfolded fingers among a plurality of categories.