Computer Vision approaches to solve the screen pose acquisition problem for Perspective Cur.pdf

1 Computer Vision approaches to solve the screen pose acquisition problem for PerspectiveCursor Miguel A. Nacenta Technical Report HCI-TR-06-01, Computer Science Department, University of Saskatchewan December 5 th , 2005 ABSTRACT PespectiveCursor is a new interaction technique for multi- display environments that significantly improves human interaction with computer systems. Computer Vision has the potential to provide a solution for the implementation of this interaction technique that might be better than the current ones. A survey of the current state-of-the-art in 2D and 3D vision shows that there are many techniques that might be of use in finding the spatial relationships between the point of view of users and the displays in the environment, which is the main requirement for an implementation of PerspectiveCursor. INTRODUCTION With the advent of cheap cameras and the continuous increase in computing power of consumer micro-processor systems, Computer Vision and Image Processing have moved from being research fields with applications only in very specialized fields (i.e. medicine, robotics) to being pervasive in consumer products (i.e. optical mice, video cameras). Tracking is one of the technologies that is already being transformed radically by the substitution of electromagnetic measurement and ultra-sound methods by computer vision. Numerous new applications in research (but also developing towards consumer products) make use of tracking in some way. The new paradigms of computing environments and Human-Computer interaction [23, 28, 34] make extensive use of the position coordinates of users and objects to provide meaningful and easy to use services. Computer Vision Tracking is getting to the point where it can provide unobtrusive, reasonably precise, reliable tracking at an affordable price. The particular application that we are interested in is called PerspectiveCursor [22]. PerspectiveCursor is an interaction