  The problem of hand shape classification is challenging since a hand is
characterized by a large number of degrees of freedom. Numerous shape
descriptors have been proposed and applied over the years to estimate and
classify hand poses in reasonable time. In this paper we discuss our parallel
framework for real-time hand shape classification applicable in real-time
applications. We show how the number of gallery images influences the
classification accuracy and execution time of the parallel algorithm. We
present the speedup and efficiency analyses that prove the efficacy of the
parallel implementation. Noteworthy, different methods can be used at each step
of our parallel framework. Here, we combine the shape contexts with the
appearance-based techniques to enhance the robustness of the algorithm and to
increase the classification score. An extensive experimental study proves the
superiority of the proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art methods.
