MIME: a gesture-driven computer interface

MIME (Mime Is Manual Expression) is a computationally efficient computer vision system for recognizing hand gestures. The system is intended to replace the mouse interface on a standard personal computer to control application software in a more intuitive manner. The system is implemented in C code with no hardware-acceleration and tracks hand motion at 30 fps on a standard PC. Using a simple two-dimensional model of the human hand, MIME employs a highly-efficient, single-pass algorithm to segment the hand and extract its model parameters from each frame in the video input. The hand is tracked from one frame to the next using a constant-acceleration Kalman filter. Tracking and feature extraction is remarkably fast and robust even when the hand is placed above difficult backdrops such as a typical cluttered desktop environment. Because of the efficient coding of the gesture tracking software, adequate CPU power remains to run standard application software such as web browsers and presentation software.