A 3D NIR camera for gesture control of video game consoles

Gesture-based human-computer interaction is presently an important area of research that aims to make reliable touch-free user interfaces a reality. More recent gesture detection technologies use cameras that rely on near-infrared (NIR) illumination to obtain 3D depth information for objects within the camera's field-of-view. These cameras use either structured light, time-of-flight (ToF), or stereoscopy. Depth images allow a person's body and hands to be separated from the background, thereby permitting modern image processing algorithms to be used for greatly improved gesture detection. This paper presents a new depth generation principle that uses a monotonic increasing and decreasing function to control NIR illumination pulses. Reflected light pulses are captured as a series of images and the depth map of the visible objects is calculated in real-time using reconfigurable hardware. Measurements and results are given to explain how the depth map is built and how the camera allows gestures to be used to control a video game console.