HAND GESTURE INTERFACE FOR WEARABLE PC

There is strong demand to create wearable PC systems that can support the user outdoors. When we are outdoors, our movement makes it impossible to use traditional input devices such as keyboards and mice. We propose a hand gesture interface based on image processing to operate wearable PCs. The semi-transparent PC screen is displayed on the head mount display (HMD), and the user makes hand gestures to select icons on the screen. The user's hand is extracted from the images captured by a color camera mounted above the HMD. Since skin color can vary widely due to outdoor lighting effects, a key problem is accurately discrimination the hand from the background. The proposed method does not assume any fixed skin color space. First, the image is divided into blocks and blocks with similar average color are linked. Contiguous regions are then subjected to hand recognition. Blocks on the edges of the hand region are subdivided for more accurate finger discrimination. A change in hand shape is recognized as hand movement. Our current input interface associates a hand grasp with a mouse click. Tests on a prototype system confirm that the proposed method recognizes hand gestures accurately at high speed. We intend to develop a wider range of recognizable gestures.