One-handed gesture recognition using ultrasonic Doppler sonar

This paper presents a new device based on ultrasonic sensors to recognize one-handed gestures. The device uses three ultrasonic receivers and a single transmitter. Gestures are characterized through the Doppler frequency shifts they generate in reflections of an ultrasonic tone emitted by the transmitter. We show that this setup can be used to classify simple one-handed gestures with high accuracy. The ultrasonic doppler based device is very inexpensive - $20 USD for the whole setup including the acquisition system, and computationally efficient as compared to most traditional devices (e.g. video). These gestures, could potentially be used to control and drive a device.