3D hand pose tracking/estimation will be very important in the next generation of human-computer interaction. Most of the currently available algorithms rely on low-cost active depth sensors. However, these sensors can be easily interfered by other active sources and require relatively high power consumption. As a result, they are currently not suitable for outdoor environments and mobile devices. This paper aims at tracking/estimating hand poses using passive stereo which avoids these limitations. A benchmark with 18,000 stereo image pairs and 18,000 depth images captured from different scenarios and the ground-truth 3D positions of palm and finger joints (obtained from the manual label) is thus proposed. This paper demonstrates that the performance of the state-of-the art tracking/estimation algorithms can be maintained with most stereo matching algorithms on the proposed benchmark, as long as the hand segmentation is correct. As a result, a novel stereo-based hand segmentation algorithm specially designed for hand tracking/estimation is proposed. The quantitative evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is suitable for the state-of-the-art hand pose tracking/estimation algorithms and the tracking quality is comparable to the use of active depth sensors under different challenging scenarios.
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