Learning to Detect Touches on Cluttered Tables

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, learning-based touch detection system for cluttered tables, enabling robust tabletop interaction through a novel camera-projector setup with a lamp form-factor.

Contribution

It presents a self-contained, on-device touch detection algorithm that is robust to clutter, advancing interactive tabletop technology with a new hardware and software integration.

Findings

Real-time touch detection on cluttered tables achieved.

Robustness to clutter demonstrated in prototype system.

Enables diverse hand-object interaction experiences.

Abstract

We present a novel self-contained camera-projector tabletop system with a lamp form-factor that brings digital intelligence to our tables. We propose a real-time, on-device, learning-based touch detection algorithm that makes any tabletop interactive. The top-down configuration and learning-based algorithm makes our method robust to the presence of clutter, a main limitation of existing camera-projector tabletop systems. Our research prototype enables a set of experiences that combine hand interactions and objects present on the table. A video can be found at https://youtu.be/hElC_c25Fg8.