US 5,594,469 · Granted 1997-01-14

The Hand-Gesture Remote That Predicted Our Touchless Future

Imagine controlling your TV by just waving your hand at the screen instead of hunting for a remote. This patent is about a camera system that watches your hand movements and translates them into commands—like volume up or channel down—by detecting where your hand is moving and matching it to virtual control buttons on the screen.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a system that detects hand gestures using a camera, identifies the position and movement of a hand in a video feed, displays a virtual hand icon on screen that follows your real hand's motion, and uses that movement to trigger machine controls like TV volume or channel changes. What's protected here is the specific method of using local image orientation correlation to distinguish the hand from a noisy background and the process of mapping hand movement to on-screen control icons.

Why it matters

This patent, filed in 1995 and granted in 1997, arrived during an era when touchless control was science fiction. It represents an early exploration of gesture-based interfaces at a time when remote controls dominated. While the technology didn't immediately revolutionize consumer electronics, it staked out conceptual ground in gesture recognition that later influenced motion-sensing systems like Kinect and laid groundwork for thinking about hands-free machine interaction.

Real-world use

When modern smart TVs or gaming consoles respond to your hand movements without touching a controller or remote, they're operating in the territory this patent mapped out decades earlier.

Original USPTO abstract

A system for the control from a distance of machines having displays incls hand gesture detection in which the hand gesture causes movement of an on-screen hand icon over an on-screen machine control icon, with the hand icon moving the machine control icon in accordance with sensed hand movements to effectuate machine control. In one embodiment, TV control led by hand signals includes detecting a single hand gesture and providing a hand icon on the screen along with the provision of icons representing TV controls such as volume, channel, color, density, etc., in which a television camera detects the hand in a noisy background through correlation techniques based on values of local image orientation. In order to trigger the system into operation, a trigger gesture such as the "how" sign is distinguished from the background through the utilization of orientation angle differences. From correlation values based on correlating local orientations between a mask defining a particular hand and the later acquired image of the hand, normalized correlation scores for each pixel are obtained, with the correlation peak being detected and then thresholded to eliminate false alarms.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,594,469
Filing date: 1995-02-21
Grant date: 1997-01-14
Assignee: Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America Inc.
Inventor(s): FREEMAN; WILLIAM T., WEISSMAN; CRAIG D.
CPC class: G06F3/017

View original record on Google Patents →

Want to file your own patent?

If you're tinkering with gesture-recognition ideas for home devices, try scanning your concept through our free patent checker to see what ground is already staked out in the consumer electronics space.

Free patentability scan