This week, I finally got my own laptop so I redownloaded all the necessary software and libraries for my gesture recognition system. Using the OpenCV library in Python, I was finally able to use the camera to detect the hand by separating the background with the foreground via thresholding. Then, I used findContours to identify the hand within a region of interest (roi). Finally, I made a copy of the the frame containing the roi and displayed the video in binary black and white. My code can now detect the hand with a static background.