Minimal Interaction Touchless Text Input with Head Movements and Stereo Vision

摘要

Many modern interfaces for human-computer interaction are based on some kind of visual system and offer touchless and convenient medium for communication for the user. These non-contact interfaces predominantly limit their operations to gesture recognition or a pointer manipulation in a graphical user interface. The problem of typing in most cases is omitted since touchless interfaces are not designed for text entry purposes. There is, however, a great number of people who suffer from some form of disability. They are unable to use standard input devices (mouse and keyboard) or modern touchless interfaces. For those physically challenged people a minimal interaction interface for text entry operated with head movements is proposed in the paper. It is based on processing video streams from a stereo webcam, uses only directional head movements and a dictionary support.