A Vision based Hand Gesture Interface for Controlling VLC Media Player

Human Computer Interaction can acquire several advantages with the introduction of different natural forms of device free communication. Gestures are a natural form of actions which we often use in our daily life for interaction, therefore to use it as a communication medium with computers generates a new paradigm of interaction with computers. This paper implements computer vision and gesture recognition techniques and develops a vision based low cost input device for controlling the VLC player through gestures. VLC application consists of a central computational module which uses the Principal Component Analysis for gesture images and finds the feature vectors of the gesture and save it into a XML file. The Recognition of the gesture is done by K Nearest Neighbour algorithm. The theoretical analysis of the approach shows how to do recognition in static background. The Training Images are made by cropping the hand gesture from static background by detecting the hand motion using Lucas Kanade Pyramidical Optical Flow algorithm. This hand gesture recognition technique will not only replace the use of mouse to control the VLC player but also provide different gesture vocabulary which will be useful in controlling the application.