Patent ID: 7593552

Claim:
A gesture recognition apparatus for recognizing postures or gestures of an object person based on images of the object person captured by cameras, comprising: a three dimensional face and fingertip position detection means for detecting a face position and a fingertip position of the object person in three-dimensional space based on three dimensional information to be produced by the images captured, wherein the three dimensional information comprises contour information, human skin region information, and distance information of the object person with respect to the cameras based on a parallax of the images captured by the cameras; and a posture or gesture recognition means which operates to detect changes of the fingertip position by detecting a relative position between the face position and the fingertip position and changes of the fingertip position relative to the face position, to process the detected changes by comparing the detected changes with posture data or gesture data previously stored, to determine whether the detected changes are a posture or a gesture of the object person, and to recognize a posture or a gesture of the object person, wherein the posture or gesture recognition means sets in the detected changes a determination region with a sufficient size for a hand of the object person, and compares an area of the hand with an area of the determination region to determine whether the compared detected changes corresponds to the gesture data or the posture data, thereby to distinguish postures from gestures, which are similar in relative position between the face position and the fingertip position.