The concept and realization of an easy-to-use, low-cost handheld IR optical sensor for universal, long-range gesture-controlled operation of technical devices is presented and recognition results with a working prototype are given. The system comprises two elements: a handheld buttonless light emitter which resembles a small laser pointer but emits a wide-angle IR random-dot pattern along with a visible light beam (for device selection) and a small photo-sensor array along with a processing/decoder unit near or in the device to be controlled. The emitted IR light is spatially modulated by a diffractive optical element (DOE) which has a specially designed micro-structured surface to generate a binary pseudo-random array of light beams. This concept allows to come up with a handheld device which contains only a few inexpensive mass-market components (since the IR-optical signal is both the information and transmission channel). User experience and gesture recognition capabilities were examined with a group of 29 elderly volunteers who were asked to repeatedly "draw" quasi-intuitive gestures with the handheld emitter towards typical home appliances like light switch, blinds, heating device, and door from distances of up to 6 meters. Applying a correlation-based reconstruction algorithm and adaptive rule-based pattern recognition with low computational load for real-time processing on low-end processors, an overall recognition rate of 94 % could be achieved so far. As the algorithm is being optimized to enable sequential spotting of meaningful gestures and enhanced class separation, the list of gestures will be extended.
«The concept and realization of an easy-to-use, low-cost handheld IR optical sensor for universal, long-range gesture-controlled operation of technical devices is presented and recognition results with a working prototype are given. The system comprises two elements: a handheld buttonless light emitter which resembles a small laser pointer but emits a wide-angle IR random-dot pattern along with a visible light beam (for device selection) and a small photo-sensor array along with a processing/deco...
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