A finger-tracking virtual mouse realized in an embedded system

In this paper, a virtual mouse that is based on tracking the movement of a finger is presented. The idea is for users to control their computer or TV system simply by moving their fingers, without any contact on realistic objects. A fast and robust method that can trace the position of finger tip is proposed. The method consists of four steps. First, the skin-color pixels of figures are detected by color segmentation using the chrominance component of the input from a CMOS image sensor. Second, density regularization processes are carried out to reinforce the regions of skin-colour pixels. Third, an effective window search technique is applied for minimizing computational cost. Fourth, a finger-tip tracking algorithm is applied to find out the finger-tip position. Clicking action is also implemented by a specific movement. The virtual mouse has been designed in an embedded Linux system. The device works successfully, the response is quick and accurate positioning is obtained.