Towards a top-view detection of body parts in an interactive tabletop environment

Abstract

Integrating digital tabletop systems in private living environments is a promising approach to enhance people's everyday life with information technology. Apart from using the surface of such a tabletop, research on the detection of interaction above and around the surface is increasing rapidly. So far, detection is limited either to very specific gestures above the surface or to rather abstract detection of users in a larger scenario. The detection of body parts in tabletop setups has rarely been investigated, although the knowledge about the whereabouts of body parts would be helpful to establish relationships between users and interactions. In this paper, we propose a system that is capable to detect body parts above and around such a tabletop setup using a depth camera. We further take up an existing approach to present how the detection in this setup could work. Additionally, we propose a new approach to obtain training data for the detection using a color suit.