Design of an interactive whiteboard system using machine vision

An interactive whiteboard is a kind of display device with the ability of pointer device similar to touch screen. Machine vision is to sense the three dimensional world with computer. In this paper, we introduce an interactive whiteboard system using machine vision techniques. This system is composed of one computer, one projector, one laser pointer and one video camera. The user points the projector screen with the laser pointer and the video camera captures the image of the projector screen. The movements of laser spot on the screen are detected from the video using machine vision techniques and mapped to the coordinate system of computer desktop. Then they are translated into the normal mouse events. The details of movement detection and coordinate system mapping are described. Some difficulties are examined and solutions are proposed.