Design and Development of Dsp Processor Based Gesture Recognition System for Real Time Applications

Human-Computer Interactions (HCI) makes computers more usable and receptive to user’s needs by improving the interactions between humans and computers. Current HCIs use keyboards, mice, joysticks and touch-screens as user interface. However, such mechanical devices are inconvenient for natural and direct interactions, whereas, the human gesture allows users to communicate with machines in a natural way. Among the available gestures for Gesture Recognition System (GRS), hand gestures are the most powerful means of communication and they find their application in educational institutions and entertainment. In the current paper, a GRS has been designed and developed for file browser application. The GRS system mainly consists of a Transmitter module and a Receiver module. The transmitter module consists of a camera, a DSP processor and a wireless RF transmitter. The receiver module consists of a wireless RF receiver, an embedded processor and a LINUX machine. The image acquired through the camera is processed by the DSP processor to recognize the captured gesture. The processing at the transmitter includes skin color segmentation, palm extraction and gesture recognition. Skin color segmentation results in extracting skin colored objects using image subtraction in conjunction with varied threshold combinations of color spaces. The segmented image is then processed further with a novel method of extracting palm region and adaptively building a bounding box around it by using the horizontal and vertical profilers. Distance profile is obtained by drawing radial lines from the centroid of the extracted palm to the edges of the contour. Gestures are analyzed and recognized based on the angle of the peak point obtained from the distance profile. The recognized gesture is transmitted to the embedded processor of the receiver module through wireless RF transceivers. The embedded processor assisted by UART device driver on Linux machine controls the file browser application at the receiver end. The functionality of the integrated GRS is tested for wireless file browser application efficiently for a distance of 50m. The development of an effective static GRS devoid of training data, multiple cameras, markers, bulky computing device and gloves constitute the original contribution of the current research. Overall, the developed GRS exhibits desirable features of robustness, portability and cost effectiveness. The experimental results for chosen four types of hand gesture, shows a recognition rate of more than 90% for each gesture