Hand tracking based on articulated distance field

US11030773B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• Google LLC · US

Inventors

• Jonathan James Taylor · San Francisco, US
• Vladimir Tankovich · Bellevue, US
• Danhang Tang · Los Angeles, US
• Cem Keskin · Seattle, US
• Adarsh Prakash Murthy Kowdle · San Francisco, US
• Philip L. Davidson · New York, US
• Shahram Izadi · Cambridge, GB
• David Kim · Cambridge, GB

Key dates

• Filing date: Feb 24, 2020
• Grant date: Jun 8, 2021
• Expiry date: Feb 24, 2040

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G06T2207/30196
• WIPO field: Computer technology
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

An electronic device estimates a pose of a hand by volumetrically deforming a signed distance field using a skinned tetrahedral mesh to locate a local minimum of an energy function, wherein the local minimum corresponds to the hand pose. The electronic device identifies a pose of the hand by fitting an implicit surface model of a hand to the pixels of a depth image that correspond to the hand. The electronic device uses a skinned tetrahedral mesh to warp space from a base pose to a deformed pose to define an articulated signed distance field from which the hand tracking module derives candidate poses of the hand. The electronic device then minimizes an energy function based on the distance of each corresponding pixel to identify the candidate pose that most closely approximates the pose of the hand.