Uncalibrated stereo vision with pointing for a man-machine interface

Abstract

Here we report preliminary work on a gesturebased interface for robot guidance. The system requires no physical contact with the o p erator, but uses uncalibrated stereo vision with active contours to track the position and pointing direction of a hand. With a ground plane constraint, it is then possible to find the indicated position in the robot's workspace, by considering only two-dimensional collineations. The system is accurate to about 2cm in a 40cm workspace; natural operator feedback improves this to within Icm. It is initialised by observing just 4 points on the plane.