Architecture and applications of the FingerMouse: a smart stereo camera for wearable computing HCI

  • Authors:
  • Patrick de la Hamette;Gerhard Tröster

  • Affiliations:
  • Wearable Computing Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland;Wearable Computing Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Personal and Ubiquitous Computing - Special Issue: Selected Papers of the ARCS06 Conference
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In this paper we present a visual input HCI system for wearable computers, the FingerMouse. It is a fully integrated stereo camera and vision processing system, with a specifically designed ASIC performing stereo block matching at 5 Mpixel/s (e.g. QVGA 320  ×  240 at 30 fps) and a disparity range of 47, consuming 187 mW (78 mW in the ASIC). It is button-sized (43 mm  ×  18 mm) and can be worn on the body, capturing the user’s hand and processing in real-time its coordinates as well as a 1-bit image of the hand segmented from the background. Alternatively, the system serves as a smart depth camera, delivering foreground segmentation and tracking, depth maps and standard images, with a processing latency smaller than 1 ms. This paper describes the FingerMouse functionality and its applications, and how the specific architecture outperforms other systems in size, latency and power consumption.