A 3D Vision-Based Ambient User Interface

Abstract

This article proposes a 3-dimensional (3D) vision-based ambient user interface as an interaction metaphor that exploits a user's personal space and its dynamic gestures. In human-computer interaction, to provide natural interactions with a system, a user interface should not be a bulky or complicated device. In this regard, the proposed ambient user interface utilizes an invisible personal space to remove cumbersome devices where the invisible personal space is virtually augmented through exploiting 3D vision techniques. For natural interactions with the user's dynamic gestures, the user of interest is extracted from the image sequences by the proposed user segmentation method. This method can retrieve 3D information from the segmented user image through 3D vision techniques and a multiview camera. With the retrieved 3D information of the user, a set of 3D boxes (SpaceSensor) can be constructed and augmented around the user; then the user can interact with the system by touching the augmented SpaceSensor. In the user's dynamic gesture tracking, the computational complexity of SpaceSensor is relatively lower than that of conventional 2-dimensional vision-based gesture tracking techniques, because the touched positions of SpaceSensor are tracked. According to the experimental results, the proposed ambient user interface can be applied to various systems that require real-time user's dynamic gestures for their interactions both in real and virtual environments.