Laser Target Tracking

Hot on the heels of my last post which dealt with target acquisition for pelting younger brothers with airsoft pellets, another group is doing much more sophesticated development on laser based target tracking. The main goals of their project isn't so much to target guns, but to do things like facilicilate gesture tracking. Gesture tracking is pretty cool because it potentially turns your fingers into a sophesticatd mouse, much like you may have seen in the film, "Minority Report". I could go on, but really you should check out their movies demoing their research, which is quite impressive: High Rez / Low Rez.

The problem of tracking hands and fingers on natural scenes has received much attention using passive acquisition vision systems and computationally intense image processing. We are currently studying a simple active tracking system using a laser diode (visible or invisible light), steering mirrors, and a single non-imaging photodetector, which is capable of acquiring three dimensional coordinates in real time without the need of any image processing at all. Essentially, it is a smart rangefinder scanner that instead of continuously scanning over the full field of view, restricts its scanning area, on the basis of a real-time analysis of the backscattered signal, to a very narrow window precisely the size of the target.

Really, go check out Ishikawa-Namiki Laboratory's video showing the lasers tracking two fingers and a bouncing ball... pretty cool to see in work.

[ Link via del ]