Visual tracking for human-computer interaction

Abstract

The purpose of this master's thesis project is to design, implement and evaluate vision-based user interfaces for use in the context of virtual environments. Three interfaces are treated. The first one is a 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) mouse that can track the position and 1 DOF or rotation (roll) of a user's hand. The second one is a 6 DOF mouse that can track both the position and the orientation of a user's hand in 3D space. Finally the third one is a laser pointing interface used to track the laser spot of a standard laser pointer, in order to interact with a large screen display. The two latter interfaces use an auto-calibrated approach based on planar homography, that distinguish them from the standard computer-vision based approach which requires a previous step of calibration.