In order to classify the presented pose of a human hand, a feature distribution map of the pose is compared to reference feature distribution maps. To generate a feature distribution map, each contour point of a hand is analyzed to determine a corresponding feature set. The feature set of a contour point includes a distance feature and an angle feature of the contour point in relation to one of its neighboring contour points. The feature sets generated from an observed pose are compared to feature sets of reference poses to determine which of the reference poses most closely matches the presented pose.