This paper represents a new hand shape representation technique that characterises the finger-only topology of the hand, by adapting an existing technique from speech signal processing. From a moving hand sequence, the tracking algorithm determines the centre of the largest convex subset of the hand, using a combination of pattern matching and condensation algorithms. A hand shape feature represents the topological formation of the finger-only regions of the hand using a Linear Predictive Coding parameter set called cepstral coefficients. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of detecting the shape feature from motion sequences.