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The use of hand gestures provides an attractive alternative to cumbersome interface devices for human-computer interaction (HCI). In particular, visual interpretation of hand gestures can help in achieving the ease and naturalness desired for HCI. This has motivated a very active research area concerned with computer vision-based analysis and interpretation of hand gestures. We survey the literature on visual interpretation of hand gestures in the context of its role in HCI. This discussion is organized on the basis of the method used for modeling, analyzing, and recognizing gestures. Important differences in the gesture interpretation approaches arise depending on whether a 3D model of the human hand or an image appearance model of the human hand is used. 3D hand models offer a way of more elaborate modeling of hand gestures but lead to computational hurdles that have not been overcome given the real …