Abstract: Video-based Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has been a popular research field in recent years. Detection of the fingertip position from video images is a very important and foundational step for many video-based HCI. In this paper, an effective fingertip detection approach based on mathematical morphology and template matching techniques is proposed. Experiment on 26,000 video images shows that the correct rate of our fingertip detection algorithm is 99.6%.