Circle & identify: interactivity-augmented object recognition for handheld devices

The first requirement of a "spatial mouse" is the ability to identify the object that it is aiming at. Among many possible technologies that can be employed for this purpose, possibly the best solution would be object recognition by machine vision. The problem, however, is that object recognition algorithms are not yet reliable enough or light enough for hand-held devices. This paper demonstrates that a simple object recognition algorithm can become a practical solution when augmented by interactivity. The user draw a circle around a target using a spatial mouse, and the mouse captures a series of camera frames. The frames can be easily stitched together to give a target image separated from the background, with which we need only additional steps of feature extraction and object classification. We present here results from two experiments with a few household objects.