Hand gestures are powerful human to human communication channel which convey a major part of information transfer in our everyday life. Hand gestures are the natural way of interactions when one person is communicating with one another and therefore hand movements can be treated as a non verbal form of communication. Hand gesture recognition is a process of understanding and classifying meaningful movements by the human hands. Nowadays vehicles launched from the industry offers an increasing number of infotainment systems as well as comfort functions that can be controlled by the driver. Though they are feature rich which demands more attention of the driver and degrade the driving performance and thereby reducing the safety. The gestural interaction is a promising means to cover the full range of driver's operational needs while minimizing the visual workload. Hand gesture recognition is of great importance for human computer interaction (HCI) because of its extensive applications in virtual reality and sign language recognition etc. Human hand is very smaller with very complex articulations comparing with the entire human body and therefore errors can be easily affected. It is thus a very challenging problem to recognize hand gestures. This paper comprises of the existing methods in detecting and recognizing hand gestures and a detailed study on their performances, accuracy, convenience, operational range and design challenges etc.

Gestural interaction Hand gesture recognition Vehicular automations HCI (Human Computer Interaction) FEMD gesture vocabulary.