OpenCV - hand skeleton nodes

Question

I am doing hand gesture recognition application, using OpenCV and single webcam.

Currently I'm basing on:
"Complex-Valued Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithm for Learning and Recognizing Various Hand Gestures" and what I want to achieve is to connect nodes of hand skeleton (thinned hand contour), to get clean final skeleton where I can analyze angles and lengths (see picture).

I have no idea how can I separate the node points from others, and connect them like in the right picture.

Any help?

Answer 1

It looks like a tree, and I think it's a good idea to build a tree from skeleton image. Then remove nodes with two neigbours. And you'll get joint and terminal points you want. You can also preprocess the tree by pruning too short branches.