Television Control by Hand Gestures

We study how a viewer can control a television set remotely by hand gestures. We address two fundamental issues of gesture{based human{computer interaction: (1) How can one communicate a rich set of commands without extensive user training and memorization of gestures? (2) How can the computer recognize the commands in a complicated visual environment? Our solution to these problems exploits the visual feedback of the television display. The user uses only one gesture: the open hand, facing the camera. He controls the television by moving his hand. On the display, a hand icon appears which follows the user's hand. The user can then move his own hand to adjust various graphical controls with the hand icon. The open hand presents a characteristic image which the computer can detect and track. We perform a normalized correlation of a template hand to the image to analyze the user's hand. A local orientation representation is used to achieve some robustness to lighting variations. We made a prototype of this system using a computer workstation and a television. The graphical overlays appear on the computer screen, although they could be mixed with the video to appear on the television. The computer controls the television set through serial port commands to an electronically controlled remote control. We describe knowledge we gained from building the prototype.