virtualMouse.txt

Human Computer Interaction today greatly emphasizes on developing more spontaneous and natural interfaces. Gesture recognition can be seen as a way for computers to begin to understand human body language, thus building a richer bridge between machines and humans than primitive text user interfaces or even GUIs (graphical user interfaces), which still limit the majority of input to mouse.The Graphical User Interface (GUI) on Personal Computers (PCs) is quiet developed, well defined and provides an efficient interface for a user to interact with the computer and access the various applications effortlessly with the help of mouse, track pad, etc. In the present day scenario most of the mobile phones are using touch screen technology to interact with the user. But this technology is still not cheap to be used in desktops and laptops. Our objective was to create a virtual mouse system using Web camera to interact with the computer in a more user friendly manner that can be an alternative approach for the touch screen.

Here a real time video has been captured using a Web-Camera. 
The webcam of the computer is used as a sensor. The webcam captures the real time video at a fixed frame rate and resolution which is determined by the hardware of the camera. The frame rate and resolution can be changed in the system if required. The user wears coloured tapes to provide information to the system. Individual frames of the video are separately processed. The processing techniques involve an image subtraction algorithm to detect colours. Once the colours are detected the system performs various operations to track the cursor and performs control actions.


The new technique has been proposed to increase the adaptability of the system. We have developed a system to control the mouse cursor and implement its function using a real time camera. The goal of this project is to create a system that will recognize the hand gestures and control the computer/laptop according to those gestures. The project will also benefit the mobile systems where using pointing devices like mouse is difficult.