Vision-based hand interface systems in human computer interaction

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2010

Öğrenci: SERKAN GENÇ

Danışman: MEHMET VOLKAN ATALAY

Özet:

People began to interact with their own environment since their birth. Their main organs to sense their surroundings are their hands, and this is the most natural way of interaction in human-human interactions. The goal of this dissertation is to enable users to employ their hands in interaction with computers similar to human-human interaction. Using hands in the computer interaction increases both the naturalness of computer usage and the speed of interaction. One way of accomplishing this goal is to utilize computer vision methods to develop hand interfaces. In this study, a regular, low-cost camera is used for image acquisition, and the images from camera are processed by our novel vision system to detect user intention. The contributions are (i) a method for interacting with a screen without touching in a distributed computer system is proposed, (ii) a benchmark of four hand shape representation methods is performed using a comprehensive hand shape video database, and (iii) a vison-based hand interface is designed for an application that queries a video database system, and its usability and performances are also assessed by a group of test users to determine its suitability for the application.