Design And Realization Of Semi-virtual Key-input Based On Shadow Analysis

Human-computer Interaction and its recent development in computer technology in modern years has grown rapidly, the inventions and researches about portable input devices into small devices is becoming an increasingly factor in development of electronic devices such as laptops, smart phones, tablet PCs and others. Whiles the traditional keyboard is commonly known to be inconvenient and has its limited reliability, robustness, and flexibility render it unsuitable for certain tasks to be attained, for example to carry as it occupies too much space, the phone keypad on the other hand cannot be operated easily with its tiny keypads, and those hinder the flexibility and the comfort ability in human-computer interaction. Virtual or projection keyboards also exists in various human machine interfaces which extends to a wide range of applications in the markets such as personal electronics, industrial automation, medical and health,automotive, public information kiosks and Automatic Teller Machines(ATM),etc.This semi-virtual keyboards is designed based on digital image processing technology which has been one of the crucial area of research over years, virtual keyboards does not need any keyboard entity, In this research thesis, a virtual keyboard is known as pure virtual keyboard, whose keys are generated by projection but on the other hand, the keyboard design in this thesis is called semi-virtual keyboard because it does inherit a partial characteristics of the pure virtual keyboards with keys printed on other objects such as paper or a fabric.This semi-virtual keyboards is designed based on digital image processing technology which has been one of the crucial area of research over years, virtual keyboards does not need any keyboard entity, semi virtual key input takes different kinds of input whiles most input uses the finger tips,this research proposes using shadow analysis base on the reason of poor illumination being a very well-studied problem under machine vision, but with dimming light the fingers becomes less visible but shadows are more pronounced in this way there is a fall on potential of shadow analysis rather than the fingers.this applies background and segmentation to process shadows with in the scene and apply the detecting as user input. So the shadow analysis is way of offering robustness in poor lighting conditions This thesis implements the keyboard function by steps as follows: the camera captures the keyboard area image with a human fingers and being processed by image processing techniques to extract the shadow of the fingers and use it as a mode of input or text entry.The contribution of this thesis focuses on the modeling and the application of image processing tools and concepts such as edge detection, background segmentation, shadow extractions and also the application of shadow analysis towards the realization of robust input even under poor illumination conditions, the thesis studies the feasibility of the shadow analysis towards the realization of a natural and cordless input although thesis claims no novelty in this area we believe that the topic is understudied and further research is merited.