Real-time gesture recognition and robot control through blob tracking

This paper presents the framework on vision based interface that has been designed to instruct a humanoid robot through gestures using image processing. Image thresholding and blob detection techniques were used to obtain gestures. Then we analyze the images to recognize the gesture given by the user in front of a web camera and take an appropriate action (like taking picture, moving robot, etc). The application is developed using OpenCV (Open Computer Vision) libraries and Microsoft Visual C++. The gestures obtained by processing the live images are used to command a humanoid robot with simple capabilities. A commercial humanoid toy robot - Robosapien was used as the output module of the system. The robot was interfaced to computer by USB-UIRT (Universal Infrared Receiver and Transmitter) module.