Motion Console
A webcam swipe console: optical flow in a gesture band above the keyboard, with each swipe bound to a command.
01 Problem
Desk gestures should drive the machine without leaving the keyboard. But a webcam pointed at a desk also sees typing, head motion and people walking behind the chair; a detector that fires on any movement is unusable.
02 Approach
Each frame runs dense Farnebäck optical flow, summarised as direction, coherence and active area inside a horizontal gesture band. The keyboard strip and the face region are ignored. An always-on spotter opens a burst on motion and fires only when impulse, horizontal dominance and coherence all clear. Swipes are programmable — launch an app, run a script — and a clip harness records gestures and distractors (typing, raise/lower) and replays them for precision, recall, false-positive rate and latency.
03 Result
While armed, a mapped swipe fires its command. The evaluation harness exists; there is no published precision/recall number yet, so none is shown here.
04 What didn’t work
Using the full frame was the first failure: typing and head motion look like swipes. Ignoring the keyboard band and face region fixed it, and a preview mode exists because the detector is easy to fool without seeing its phase and last rejection.