A hardware design of camera-based user´s presence detector

This paper introduces a prototype hardware design for detecting user´s presence in front of computer-based video camera. The hardware implements basic image processing techniques (filtering, color-based segmentation, thresholding) producing a signal when a human-skin color segment is detected in the image frame. Experiments show that the design allows real-time user monitoring (30 fps) with 82% detection accuracy while consuming as 35 times as less power than analogous software.