Intelligent room and 200Hz small range image sensor

In this talk I introduce two research results in Intelligent Sensing System Laboratory at Chuo University, Japan.

1. Intelligent room: There are several studies to make a space (typically, a room) intelligent. Our intelligent room is one of them and aims at operation of home appliances by recognizing gestures. Pan-tilt-zoom cameras are set in a room. An operator waves his/her hand to indicate the intention to operate an appliance and the room detects it. A camera is zoomed up and hand color is registered. Hand regions are extracted using the registered color. Selecting an appliance by pointing, volume up/down by gestures, changing channels by recognizing the number of fingers, etc. are implemented.

2. 200Hz small range image sensor: High-speed range image sensors have been developed recently. However, their speed is up to video rate and a faster sensor is required for robot pplications. We are constructing a high-speed range image sensor using a multi-spot laser projector. The proposed sensor realizes 200Hz measurement. It consists of a commercially available laser projector and a high-speed CCD camera. The sensor's size is small and feasible for mobile robots.