Contactless Gesture Recognition for Mobile Devices

While gesture interfaces become pervasive, most existing approaches are undesirable for mobile devices because of the high power consumption, or the inconvenience that users need to wear/hold specific sensors. In this paper, we present a contactless gesture recognition system for mobile devices using proximity sensors. A set of infrared signal feature extraction methods and a decision-tree-based gesture classifier are proposed. The system allows a user to interact with mobile devices using intuitive gestures, without touching the screen or wearing/holding any additional device. Evaluation results show that the system is low-power, and able to recognize gestures with over 98% precision in real time.