Real-time feet movement detection and tracking for controlling a Toy car

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach of controlling vehicles by detection of visual foot movement. It discusses the constraints imposed by the use of moving vehicle during real-time foot movement tracking. The visual feet tracking attributes ensure the fact that, unlike its counterpart in physical world, our driving does not involve effort of steering. The proposed technique comprises of two main parts; Software part and Hardware part. The Software part consists of the steps, namely, Initialization phase for initializing the software according to environmental conditions, Feature extraction phase to extract features, parameters calculation phase to calculate parameters in order to determine direction of motion. The hardware part consists of Toy car's RC alteration and Communication from personal computer using serial or parallel port. It works in real-time optimizing the problems caused by shadows. The output parameters are used for detection of any movement made by foot. So the input to the software part is the stream of images of foot and the output produced by the software part are the parameters specifying direction of motion. These parameters are input to the hardware part, which in this case is a toy car, and the hardware performs desired action.