X-Eye: A Novel Wearable Vision System

This paper proposes a smart portable device, named the X-Eye, which provides a gesture interface with a small size but a large display for the application of photo capture and management. The wearable vision system is implemented with embedded systems and can achieve real-time performance. The hardware of the system includes an asymmetric dual-core processer with an ARM core and a DSP core. The display device is a pico projector which has a small volume size but can project large screen size. A triple buffering mechanism is designed for efficient memory management. Software functions are partitioned and pipelined for effective execution in parallel. The gesture recognition is achieved first by a color classification which is based on the expectation-maximization algorithm and Gaussian mixture model (GMM). To improve the performance of the GMM, we devise a LUT (Look Up Table) technique. Fingertips are extracted and geometrical features of fingertip's shape are matched to recognize user's gesture commands finally.In order to verify the accuracy of the gesture recognition module, experiments are conducted in eight scenes with 400 test videos including the challenge of colorful background, low illumination, and flickering. The processing speed of the whole system including the gesture recognition is with the frame rate of 22.9FPS. Experimental results give 99% recognition rate. The experimental results demonstrate that this small-size large-screen wearable system has effective gesture interface with real-time performance.