Hand-free Gesture Recognition for Vehicle Infotainment System Control

Gesture recognition has a rapidly growing market size which is forcasted to increase from 14 billion in 2012 to 44 billion in 2020. Applying gesture recognition for vehicle infotainment system control is considered a promising alternative against traditional buttons, touch screens, or even speech-based control for its numerous advantages. However, existing gesture control solutions either depend on camera which imposes privacy concern and is sensitive to light condition or require users to wear a device on their hand which makes it inconvenient to use. Therefore, the work proposes to use the acoustic-based device-free hand tracking technology for gesture recognition. Because it only requires an ordinary speaker and microphone which are already available on vehicles or equipped in smart phones, it doesn’t cast additional hardware cost or installation. We implement the proposed gesture control in Android phones and show it’s feasibility for vehicle infotainment system control.