Single camera-based remote pointing and recognition for monitor-based augmented reality surgical systems

Abstract

Previous approaches to remote pointing require the use of additional equipment such as stereo cameras or depth rangefingers, which affects the portability of the remote pointing solution. Most laptops come with a front-facing camera which can be exploited as an input device to remotely manipulate the cursor position without using the keyboard or mouse. Using a passive pointing device and a robust calibration algorithm to obtain the image-to-screen homography, a vision-based system can detect the pointer position and translate it into a cursor position. Our experiments show that webcam-based remote pointing can achieve reasonable accuracy without the need for additional equipment, and has the potential to be used as part of an augmented reality surgical system. © 2012 ACM.