Real-Time Gesture Camera Gesture Recognition and Control of Actuated Mechanisms

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a growing field in which computer scientists study novel ways in which humans can interact with computers naturally and intuitively. One of the most widely researched topics in this field is hand gesture recognition, where hand movements are used to control applications in computers. Human-computer interaction is currently an active field in computer science, with companies such as Microsoft working on a motion sensing input device project called Natal (Kinect for Xbox 360). Real-time, static and dynamic hand gesture recognition allows, users the ability to interact with computers in more natural and intuitive ways. Hand can be used to communicate much more information by itself compared to computer mice, joysticks, etc, allowing a greater number of possibilities for Human Computer Interaction. One of the most basic problems in HCI is getting a computer to recognize hand postures and hand gestures. Hand posture recognition is based on static model of the hand, while a gesture is dynamic, and involves a change in pose. There are two ways to implement a gesture and posture recognition system. Cyber glove based, which uses sensors to detect movement, and Vision based. A cyber glove based

system will give the most accurate tracking results, but requires the most advanced hardware. The
second method is a vision-based approach. This involves using a simple web cam to provide an image of

the hand and extract data from it. This approach is the cheapest, and the most lightweight.
Gesture camera is a vision system which captures and processes image to extract applicationspecific information in real time. Gesture cameras are used in many applications such as automatic control systems, machine vision systems, automatic video surveillance systems and human computer interfaces. A gesture camera has a special processing algorithms (Neural networks, Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST)), which performs information processing of acquired signal. The purpose of this work is to design and develop a real-time gesture recognition that can be used in a variety of Human Computer Interaction applications with the aim of developing a prototype system for actuating to reduce human effort.