Virtual Whiteboard: A gesture-controlled pen-free tool emulating school whiteboard

In the paper the so-called Virtual Whiteboard is presented which may be an alternative solution for modern electronic whiteboards based on electronic pens and sensors. The presented tool enables the user to write, draw and handle whiteboard contents using his/her hands only. An additional equipment such as infrared diodes, infrared cameras or cyber gloves is not needed. The user's interaction with the Virtual Whiteboard computer application is based on dynamic hand gesture recognition. Gestures are recognized in the process of analyzing video stream obtained from a webcam coupled with a multimedia projector displaying whiteboard contents. The tracking positions of hands in the image is supported by Kalman filtering. In the paper the hardware and software of the Virtual Whiteboard is presented with a special focus on utilizing Kalman filters for prediction of consecutive hand positions. For the gestures applied to handle whiteboard contents, examined efficacy of Kalman filter supported recognition and the efficacy without using the filtering is given. In addition, the results of system efficiency tests are provided.