Hand Gesture Recognition System as an Alternative Interface for Remote Controlled Home Appliances

Remote controls are commonly used today as an interface for almost all consumer electronic equipment. Different home appliances use a multitude of remote controllers, offering a variety of problems: confusion in the different button layout, spending time in looking for the right remote, problems in replacement when destroyed and so on. Hand gestures have been one of the oldest and natural methods of human interaction. It is considered as an interaction medium that can possibly deliver more intuitive, creative and natural method for communication between human and a machine. The researchers choose to create an android based hand gesture controlled interface system for home appliances that serves as an alternative to existing remote controllers. The camera of the android device will be used to detect static hand gestures for processing. The gathered data will be compared to a database of recognizable static hand gestures to execute commands on certain home appliances using infrared light. After series of testing and evaluation, the system is able to execute control functions to the home appliances indicated by specific hand gestures. The system required correct execution of the corresponding static gesture to properly execute the command functions of the appliances with proper lighting and illuminance for proper recognition else it would result into loss of accuracy and false detection. For the system to be able to communicate or receive information the transmission of the sender (IR) should be in line of sight to the receivers (IR) with six (6) meters range between the appliances and the mobile phone. A 100% success rate of gesture recognition was observed in Samsung Galaxy S4 with 2.26451 seconds recognition time while there were only three failures of hand gesture detection using Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with 2.6991 seconds recognition time.