Geremin": 2D microgestures for drivers based on electric field sensing

We introduce the "Geremin" approach on in-car 2D microgesture recognition, which belongs to the category of electric field sensing techniques detecting the presence of a human hand near a conductive object (not affected by light and dynamic backgrounds, fast response times). The core component is essentially a modified "Theremin", an early electronic musical instrument named after the Russian inventor Professor Leon Theremin. Gesture recognition is done using a Dynamic Time Warp DTW algorithm. With respect to the application domain, we follow the direction of "selective mapping to theme or function" suggested in the literature. For gesture location, we propose the immediate proximity of the steering wheel, which has the advantage of providing gesture-based interaction without requiring the driver to take off hand(s). The major motivating factor for the proposed approach is reducing installation costs. Although, we use a single-antenna setup for this study, our results indicate that the gain in recognition accuracy justifies the use of two or more.