This paper introduces a new method for detecting and localizing hand landmarks in 2D color images. Location of the hand landmarks is an important source of information for recognizing hand gestures, effectively exploited in a number of recent methods which operate from the depth maps. However, this problem has not yet been satisfactorily solved for 2D color images. Here, we propose to analyze the skin-presence masks, as well as the directional image of a hand using the distance transform and template matching. This makes it possible to detect the landmarks located both at the contour and inside the hand masks. Moreover, we performed an extensive experimental study to compare the proposed method with a number of state-of-the-art algorithms. The obtained quantitative and qualitative results clearly indicate that our approach outperforms other methods, which may help improve the existing gesture recognition systems.

Robot manipulator teaching is a time consuming procedure where qualified operator programs the execution path. In this paper we introduce and discuss the improvement of traditional teaching method with application of hand gesture recognition system. The paper presents the most common robot programming and hand gesture recognition issues and presents the possibility of joining this two research fields.