Transforming lifestyle through information devices with “eyes”

Lecturer Takashi Komuro
(Department of Information Physics and Computing)

You might imagine a robot when you hear “adding eyes to a machine” but Lecturer Komuro views it differently through his research eyes.  The aim of his research is developing new tools that impact people’s lifestyle and boldly change society and life by adding eyes (machine vision) to information devices such as home appliances and mobile devices using vision technology.

He revealed a system to read finger movement in the air and input characters with a camera installed on mobile devices.  Capturing consecutive images of finger movement at the rate of 100 to 200 images per second is the key, which is several times faster than a video frame rate of 30 images per second.  The state of finger movement can be accurately tracked by following the moving images in a continuous manner.  With a keyboard or a touch panel, operation is captured as a finger touches it while this system sends feedback through another sense such as flashing the screen or emitting a sound to know that finger movement and information input are linked.

　Machine vision is expected to be broadly applied to information appliances, intelligent robots, and automobiles that require real-time information processing more than ever.  Lecturer Komuro strives to create a new image processing world with 1) visual sensors to capture massive image information, 2) ultra high speed processors to process the information, 3) algorithms to realize optimal functions, and 4) killer applications.  Based on this perspective, potential applications have been presented especially in FA, including instantaneous control of robots, positioning of machine tools, inspection, monitoring, and security.  His research group developed a “vision chip” that takes and processes 1,000 images per second and a projector comprised of this chip has enabled three-dimensional measurement of hands by capturing the movement of hands held over the camera.  The world is watching the ideas of the young researcher who aspires to transform lifestyle with image processing technology.