IPASJ International Journal of Electronics & Communication (IIJEC)

Web Site: http://www.ipasj.org/IIJEC/IIJEC.htm

Email: editoriijec@ipasj.org
ISSN 2321-5984

A Publisher for Research Motivation........

Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

Hand Gesture Based Low-Cost Appliance

Control System
Biju V.G. 1, Anith Mohan2 and Akhil K.A, Aravind K.Kumar, Aswathy, Meenu C.Varghese3
1 Associate

Professor, College of Engineering Munnar, Department of Electronics and Communications

2 Assistant

Professor, College of Engineering Munnar, Department of Electronics and Communications

3 UG

Scholar, College of Engineering Munnar, Department of Electronics and communications, CUSAT

ABSTRACT
In this progressive world, human machine interaction is being facilitated using various methods such as a remote
controlled TV, stereo etc. In this paper, hand gesture based system is used as a solution to eliminate the TV remote.
The system was tested for various distances between the user and the system. The corresponding gesture recognition
accuracy was noted. The average gesture accuracy was noted to be 60%.
Keywords: PIR detector, dedicated hardware system, hand gesture recognition, camera module

1. INTRODUCTION
Till now, remote controlled electronic appliances have been innovated for several generations while the controller keeps
nearly unchanged during a long period. Recently, with the innovations of remote controlled appliances, more and more
frequent controlling operations are required, which makes the traditional point-click-style hand-held controller
inconvenient. For eliminating the use of remote, some methods are adopted as voice control with the speech recognition
module [6]-[7], the appliance can interpret the users voice command and then response accordingly. However, there
are still difficulties in voice control. The speech recognition algorithm is not mature enough due to large number of
vocabularies and various dialects and the interference including the environmental noise will affect voice recognition to
a large extent and are not easy to eliminate. Additionally, the recognition module is always kept ON in order to detect
when and what kind of voice command is activated, which leads to much computational cost and power consumption.
By using gestural interactions machines may be easier to operate. Another kind of hand-free controlling is the hand
gestures [1], where gestures are detected and recognized and used as command signals for controlling. Free-hand
control makes the controlling much easier for the user to master and use. Hand gesture interaction can be done in
different ways like gesture drawing, space mouse [2], using data glove [3], touch pad [5] and wearable one like a
wristwatch [4].Recognition of hand gesture is one of the major concerns. Hand gesture recognition is a comprehensive
problem because of the complexity of the visual analysis of hand gestures and the highly structured nature of hand
gesture. Hand gesture recognition can be used for many applications. Recently, research in hand gesture recognition
aims at control of household electronic appliances and human computer interaction, etc.
This system proposes a dedicated embedded system for detecting and capturing the image. The captured image
undergoes gesture recognition process and this processed image is used for appliance control. The rest of the paper is
arranged as follows. In coming section the methodology is described and next sections describe results and conclusions
respectively.

2. METHODOLOGY
2.1 SYSTEM OVER VIEW
Based on the motion detected in front of the PIR detector, the camera module turns ON. The camera module will
capture the image of the gestures. These gestures undergoes the recognition process. Then the corresponding action for
each gestures are recognized. These recognized gestures can be used for appliance control. This whole process is shown
in figure 1.

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IPASJ International Journal of Electronics & Communication (IIJEC)

A Publisher for Research Motivation........

Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

Web Site: http://www.ipasj.org/IIJEC/IIJEC.htm

Email: editoriijec@ipasj.org
ISSN 2321-5984

Figure 1-system over view

2.2 DEDICATED HARDWARE SYSTEM
This hardware system consists of PIR detector. It uses IR sensors and it consists of two slots. When the sensor is in idle
situation both slots have same amount of IR. When a motion of the hand is detected in front of the PIR detector, it
intercepts one half of the IR sensor. Due to this a signal is passed to an object c. This object c is used for the serial
communication and this will turn ON the camera module. Then firstly, consider different cases for gestures and each
gesture is assigned with a character. Each character will pass a serial data. The serial data will turn ON the camera
module. The camera module captures the image of gestures. This captured gestures undergoes gesture recognition
processing. The dedicated hardware system is shown in figure2 .This hardware part is implemented on Arduino UNO
and the processing unit is ATmega328 microcontroller. It uses input and output ports to communicate with the outside
world.

Figure2-Dedicated hardware system

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IPASJ International Journal of Electronics & Communication (IIJEC)

A Publisher for Research Motivation........

Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

Web Site: http://www.ipasj.org/IIJEC/IIJEC.htm

Email: editoriijec@ipasj.org
ISSN 2321-5984

2.3 GESTURE RECOGNITION PROCESS

Image is captured by the camera and the size is reduced to reduce the execution time. The captured RGB image is
converted to gray scale image. Apply threshold to gray scale image and it is then converted to binary image. The
method used to recognize gestures is contour detection method. Then divide the image into windows of 4x4. If value of
one pixel in a window is in the set range then all pixels in that window are converted to white, else convert all pixels to
black. Now the contour is formed. The resulted contour is smoothened by reducing number of points on the contour.
For detecting the number of fingers convexity defects of resulted contour is found out. Convexity defects gives the
number of fingers and hence gesture is recognized. The gesture recognition process is shown in figure3.

Figure3-Gesture recognition

3.RESULTSAND DISCUSSIONS
Here, figure 4 shows the gestures used for appliance control. For example, if these gestures are used for controlling
DVD player:
(a) denotes play
(b) stop
(c) pause
(d) volume up
(e) volume down

Figure 4- Gestures
Figure 5 shows gestures and corresponding dilated images. These dilated images will have the convex hull and the
points of convexity defects from which we can calculate the number of fingers. Hence the hand gesture is recognized
and can be used for controlling any remote controlled appliance

Figure 5-Gestures and corresponding dilated images

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IPASJ International Journal of Electronics & Communication (IIJEC)

A Publisher for Research Motivation........

Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

Web Site: http://www.ipasj.org/IIJEC/IIJEC.htm

Email: editoriijec@ipasj.org
ISSN 2321-5984

Table1- Accuracy of proposed system

4. CONCLUSION
The proposed system makes it easier to control appliances. It reduces power consumption when compared with the
existing system. The proposed system is user friendly. There is no need for an image database, as the image processing
portion in this system is based on real time image processing techniques. The system fails when there is a lot of
background light and also when the gesture is a significant distance away from the camera. The extent of dilation that
can be achieved by the system is limited and hence large amounts of noise cannot be compensated.

References
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AUTHORS
Akhil K.A, Aravind K.Kumar, Aswathy, Meenu C. Varghese ,UG Scholar, Department of Electronics and
Communications, College of Engineering Munnar,CUSAT under the guidance of associate professor Mr. Biju V.G and
assistant professor Mr. Anith Mohan of College of Engineering Munnar, Department of Electronics and
Communications Engineering.

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