Teachme, A Gesture Recognition System with Customization Feature

Abstract

Many presentation these days are done with the help of a presentation tool. Lecturers at Universities and researchers in conferences use such tools to order the flow of the presentation and to help audiences follow the presentation points. Presenters control the presentation tools using mouse and keyboard which keep the presenters always beside the computer machine to be close enough to the keyboard and mouse. This reduces the ability of the lecturer to move close to the audiences and reduces the eye contact with them. Moreover, using such traditional techniques in controlling presentation tools lack the communication naturalness. Several gesture recognition tools are introduced as solutions for these problems. However, these tools require the user to learn specific gestures to control the presentation and/or the mouse. These specific gestures can be considered as a gestures vocabulary for the gesture recognition system. This paper introduces a gesture recognition system, TeachMe, which controls Microsoft PowerPoint presentation tool and the mouse pointer. TeachMe also has a gesture customization feature that allows the user to customize some gestures according to his/her preference. TeachMe uses Kinect device as an interface for capturing gestures. This paper, specifically, discusses in details the techniques and factors taken into consideration for implementing the system and its customization feature.