IV. Object recognition The purpose of hand-position-recognition is the specification of an object in the workspace by pointing to it. The detection of the hand position serves as a pre-selection of the region of interest (ROI) in the image. In our case, the ROI is defined as a triangular area in the bird’s eye view of the table which covers a sector with 30_ opening angle in front of the fingertip. Within this sector the object which is nearest to the fingertip is considered to be specified by the user’s pointing gesture. The specification might be supported by a verbal command to avoid ambiguities. At this point the robot has simply to detect or, if there are further ambiguities, to recognize the specified object.