hand gesture recognition in images using image processing techniques

I'm trying to segment the hand out of the images (an example is shown below). but i'm facing a problem because the illumination is not uniform and the hand has a ring. I've seen code for fixing nonuniform illumination but they did not work well on skin images like these. Is there a better way to fix the illumination of the image? or even a better way to segment the hand?

In addition, I want to recognize the number of fingers in the image. Could you recommend algorithms to try?

Note: I want to use image processing without any machine learning.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Here are some recommended, published algorithms:

http://www.visionbib.com/bibliography/contentspeople.html#Face%20Recognition,%20Detection,%20Tracking,%20Gesture%20Recognition,%20Fingerprints,%20Biometrics

Pick one and code it up. (No one here has any of them ready to hand over to you.)