Wearable Virtual Tablet:
Fingertip Drawing on a
Portable Plane-Object using an Active-Infrared Camera
We propose the Wearable Virtual Tablet (WVT), where a user can draw a locus on a common object with a plane surface (e.g., a notebook and a magazine) with a fingertip. Our previous WVT, however, could not work on a plane surface with complicated texture patterns: Since our WVT employs an active-infrared camera and the reflected infrared rays vary depending on patterns on a plane surface, it is difficult to estimate the motions of a fingertip and a plane surface from an observed infrared-image. In this paper, we propose a method to detect and track their motions without interference from colored patterns on a plane surface. (1) To find the region of a plane object in the observed image, four edge lines that compose a rectangular object can be easily extracted by employing the properties of an active-infrared camera. (2) To precisely determine the position of a fingertip, we utilize a simple finger model that corresponds to a finger edge independent of its posture. (3) The system can distinguish whether or not a fingertip touches a plane object by analyzing image intensities in the edge region of the fingertip.