Input Method by Hand Motion for a Portable Information Appliance

This paper proposes a new input and control method detecting hand motion movement vectors captured by a small camera on a home appliance such as a remote controller. The proposal involves choosing the appropriate control information when either the whole hand or only the palm is captured. First, the problems in using conventional motion vector detection technology as the input method in a portable device are described. Next, an input method by switching the referenced parameters used for recognition when the range of acquisition of the images differs is proposed. Additionally, the block-matching method is applied to detect the motion vector because the ability to handle changes in brightness is required for consumer use environments. Moreover, how to reduce computational complexities and modify the detection accuracy of the rate vector are discussed. Finally, an experiment of operating a user interface based on the proposed method was conducted by using a practical system with an embedded MCU and a small camera. Consequently the effectiveness of the proposal was successfully confirmed.