Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

One-Handed Gesture Recognition Using Ultrasonic Doppler Sonar

Citation:   Kalgaonkar, K.; Raj, B., "One-Handed Gesture Recognition Using Ultrasonic Doppler Sonar", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2009 (ICASSP 2009)
MERL Report:  TR2009-014

This paper presents a new device based on ultrasonic sensors to recognize one-handed gestures. The device uses three ultrasonic receivers and a single transmitter. Gestures are characterized through the Doppler frequency shifts they generate in reflections of an ultrasonic tone emitted by the transmitter. We show that this setup can be used to classify simple one-handed gestures with high accuracy. The ultrasonic doppler based device is very inexpensive - $20 USD for the whole setup including the acquisition system, and computationally efficient as compared to most traditional devices (e.g. video).

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