A Method to Control Home Appliances Based on Writing Commands Over the Air

This paper presents a live, free, and real-time video- based pointing method, which allows the users to write hand gesture-based control commands over the air in front of an installed camera in order to control the home appliances. The proposed method has four main parts, viz: finger tracking, OCR analysis, appliance control circuit, and appliance-monitoring system, respectively. The proposed system is tested on two test beds, i.e., computer and mobile device based. Moreover, the proposed system is tested for three different types of communication links, which are dedicated wire, Bluetooth, and global system for mobile (GSM). Results of the performed tests indicate an improvement of 92.023 % in the overall accuracy gained by the proposed system. It is observed that the average recognition time required for per input character is 0.52 s. The average time observed for processing and acknowledgment (from DMG to computer/mobile) is 0.23, 2, 15 s for dedicated wire, Bluetooth, and GSM–SMS-based communication links, respectively.