Hand Gesture Recognition Using Ultrasonic Waves

AlSharif, Mohammed H.

Hand Gesture Recognition Using Ultrasonic Waves

Files

Thesis_final.pdf (9.4 MB)

MS Thesis Approval-signed.pdf (1.66 MB)

Copyright form.pdf (238.73 KB)

Embargo End Date

2017-05-13

Type

Thesis

Date

2016-04

Access Restrictions

At the time of archiving, the student author of this thesis opted to temporarily restrict access to it. The full text of this thesis became available to the public after the expiration of the embargo on 2017-05-13.

Abstract

Gesturing is a natural way of communication between people and is used in our everyday conversations. Hand gesture recognition systems are used in many applications in a wide variety of fields, such as mobile phone applications, smart TVs, video gaming, etc. With the advances in human-computer interaction technology, gesture recognition is becoming an active research area. There are two types of devices to detect gestures; contact based devices and contactless devices. Using ultrasonic waves for determining gestures is one of the ways that is employed in contactless devices. Hand gesture recognition utilizing ultrasonic waves will be the focus of this thesis work. This thesis presents a new method for detecting and classifying a predefined set of hand gestures using a single ultrasonic transmitter and a single ultrasonic receiver. This method uses a linear frequency modulated ultrasonic signal. The ultrasonic signal is designed to meet the project requirements such as the update rate, the range of detection, etc. Also, it needs to overcome hardware limitations such as the limited output power, transmitter, and receiver bandwidth, etc. The method can be adapted to other hardware setups. Gestures are identified based on two main features; range estimation of the moving hand and received signal strength (RSS). These two factors are estimated using two simple methods; channel impulse response (CIR) and cross correlation (CC) of the reflected ultrasonic signal from the gesturing hand. A customized simple hardware setup was used to classify a set of hand gestures with high accuracy. The detection and classification were done using methods of low computational cost. This makes the proposed method to have a great potential for the implementation in many devices including laptops and mobile phones. The predefined set of gestures can be used for many control applications.

Citation

AlSharif, M. H. (2016). Hand Gesture Recognition Using Ultrasonic Waves. KAUST Research Repository. https://doi.org/10.25781/KAUST-6S4B0

DOI

10.25781/KAUST-6S4B0

Permanent link to this record

http://hdl.handle.net/10754/609434

Collections

MS Theses
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
Electrical and Computer Engineering Program

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