A new NIR camera for gesture control of electronic devices

Since the introduction Gesture Control technology in the electronic gaming technology a series of attempts have been made to deploy it also on other domains such as robotics, teaching, medical, automotive and many others. Human gesture used for Man-Machine Interaction became attractive as it offers a simpler way of controlling sophisticated devices, in a sci-fi-like scenario, in return of an increasingly computational power required by the artificial intelligence algorithms needed to detect, track and recognize them. There have been attempts to bring a solution to it by using 2D or 3D based image processing methods. There is a clear balance incline towards 3D methods in the consumer product as besides the almost insurmountable difficulties for producing robust and stable results, the price constraint added supplementary hurdles. As perfect illumination conditions are core factors in obtaining the above results, the infrared light was unanimously adopted by the domain technologies. In this paper, a novel real-time depth-mapping principle and a corresponding hardware solution for an IR depth-mapping camera is introduced. The new IR camera architecture comprises an illuminator module which is pulsed and modulated via a monotonic function using a phase-locked loop control for the laser intensity, while the reflected infrared light is captured during the increasing and decreasing monotonic function. A reconfigurable hardware architecture (RHA) unit calculates the depth and controls the IR waves in synchronism with the infrared sensor. The resolution of the depth map is variable depending on the resolution and gating possibilities of the image sensor. A sensor of 1 megapixel is used, providing a resolution of 1024×1024. Images of real objects are reconstructed in 3D based on the data obtained by the laser controlled by the RHA. A corresponding image processing algorithm builds the 3D map of the object in real-time. In this paper the camera is used to control consumer electronic products such as TV sets, laptops and others.