A peer-to-peer architecture for distributed real-time gesture recognition

We describe a peer-to-peer multiple-camera architecture for a distributed real-time gesture recognition system. Previous work attaches multiple cameras to a server This simplifies many design problems but is impractical for real-world installations. Our architecture uses a network of relatively inexpensive cameras to gather images in order to provide high resolution at low cost. Computations are done at the embedded processors in each camera, without using a centralized server. We also propose a methodology for transforming well-defined single-camera algorithms to multiple cameras. We migrate our single-camera gesture recognition system into multiple cameras with slightly overlapped views. In order to minimize the communication bandwidth and power consumption, only selected contours or ellipses information is transmitted between the cameras.