Towards a non-contact driver-vehicle interface

A novel, non-contact, pointing interface is being developed for the control of non-safety critical systems inside a vehicle with the aims of improving safety, decreasing manufacturing cost and improving the ease of driver migration between different cars. A driver operates the interface via an on-screen cursor using pointing gestures to be identified by a computer vision system. This paper describes the vision subsystem responsible for detection and tracking of the driver´s hands. To be robust, it must detect and track under varying lighting conditions with no prior assumptions concerning the colour of the hands or clothing. Adaptive foreground and background models are used for segmentation and a robust geometrical hand model is employed for tracking. The system is demonstrated working at speeds close to real-time on a standard PC using image sequences captured inside a car