A Study on the Development of Touchless Mouse by Object Tracking through Webcam

In this paper, we study the continuous growth of computer technology and the increasing importance of human-computer interaction. Interactive touch-less is now an undergoing developing technology in real life. Touchless technology introduces a new way of interacting with computers by object tracking method. Nowadays most mobile devices are using touchscreen technology. However, this technology is still not cheap enough to be used in desktop systems. Designing a touchless device such as a mouse or keyboard using a webcam and computer vision techniques can be an alternative way of touch screen technology. Recent trends in technology aim to build highly interactive and easy-to-use applications as a replacement for conventional devices. Such a device is touchless mouse. Its development is completed on the MATLAB platform. The overall objective is to apply image processing techniques from video to track the movement of color which is captured by a webcam and that is converted into mouse movements and operations to control the system. The sub-system which is implemented here would allow a person to control his/her mouse without any input other than the marker movements. We use three fingers (with color) as three color markers (red, green, blue) for completing the activities of a mouse. My first goal was to successfully track the marker color and the second goal was to track the marker position from the acquired image frame for performing the mouse operations. The webcam is used to capture the information on the marker and trigger the associated actions. I use java.awt. Robot file for performing the mouse operations using the acquired data from the image frame.