A Survey of Hand Posture and GestureRecognition Techniques and Technology

A Survey of Hand Posture and Gesture Recognition Techniques and Technology

Laviola presents an excellent literature survey over hand and gesture recognition.
Included are:

Devices - Tracking and gloves
Methods:
Features - Template Matching, PCA
Learning - Neural Nets, HMMS, Instance-based method
Applications:
Sign Language Recognition
Gesture to Speech
Virtual Reality
3D Modeling
Control Systems (robots, tv, etc)

Discussion
A good starting point to find useful methods. Summarizes the state of the art at 1999. We're still using pretty much the same methods 8 years later.

Reference
Joseph J. LaViola, Jr. (1999). A Survey of Hand Posture and Gesture
Recognition Techniques and Technology, Brown University.