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Human body tracking with electric field ranging

Published: 06 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a passive, simple, and affordable electric field based ranging method for capturing human position, leaning, and hand or leg movements. A test system transforms the physical input into a two-dimensional position in an indoor environment. The method and the designed test system can be used, for example, in gaming, virtual exhibition, and virtual reality applications. The proposed system measures the capacitances between a user, standing on a transmitting floor electrode, and four vertically aligned receiver wires placed at the corners of the tracking area. The system converts the measured capacitances to absolute distances, which in turn can be used to resolve the unambiguous position of the user. The design was verified in a 1.8 x 1.8 m-sized test space by using the structures of a virtual reality cave. The test system can track a human body with relative accuracy of less than 10.4 cm at an update rate of 19.5 Hz.

References

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Moeslund, T., Hilton, A., and Krüger, V. 2006. A survey of advances in vision-based human motion capture and analysis. Computer Vision and Image Understanding. 104(2), 90--126.
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Nishida, Y., Murakami, S., Toshio, H., and Mizoguchi, H. 2004. Minimally privacy-violative system for locating human by ultrasonic radar embedded on ceiling. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 1549--1554.
[3]
Pirttikangas, S., Suutala, J., Riekki, J., and Röning, J. 2003. Footstep Identification from Pressure Signals Using Hidden Markov Models. Proceedings of the Finnish Signal Processing Symposium, pp. 124--128.
[4]
Smith, J., White, T., Dodge, C., Paradiso, J., Gershenfeld, N. and Allport, D. 1998. Electric field sensing for graphical interfaces. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 54--60, May/June.
[5]
Rimminen, H., Lindström, J., and Sepponen, R. 2009. Positioning Accuracy And Multi-Target Separation With A Human Tracking System Using Near Field Imaging. International Journal On Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems, 2, 156--175.
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Valtonen, M., Mäentausta, J., and Vanhala, J. 2009. TileTrack: Capacitive Human Tracking Using Floor Tiles. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2009, 31--40

Cited By

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  • (2020)A Review on Applications of Capacitive Displacement Sensing for Capacitive Proximity SensorIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29777168(45325-45342)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2017)A capacitive proximity sensing scheme for human motion detection2017 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC)10.1109/I2MTC.2017.7969712(1-5)Online publication date: May-2017
  • (2014)LightVestProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Body Area Networks10.4108/icst.bodynets.2014.257045(186-192)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2014
  1. Human body tracking with electric field ranging

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    MindTrek '10: Proceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments
    October 2010
    270 pages
    ISBN:9781450300117
    DOI:10.1145/1930488
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    • Tampere University of Technology
    • UTA: The University of Tampere
    • Tampere University of Applied Sciences

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 06 October 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. capacitive measurement
    2. electric field
    3. human tracking
    4. human-computer interaction
    5. indoor positioning
    6. user interface

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    MindTrek '10
    Sponsor:
    • UTA
    MindTrek '10: Academic MindTrek 2010
    October 6 - 8, 2010
    Tampere, Finland

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 110 of 207 submissions, 53%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2020)A Review on Applications of Capacitive Displacement Sensing for Capacitive Proximity SensorIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29777168(45325-45342)Online publication date: 2020
    • (2017)A capacitive proximity sensing scheme for human motion detection2017 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC)10.1109/I2MTC.2017.7969712(1-5)Online publication date: May-2017
    • (2014)LightVestProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Body Area Networks10.4108/icst.bodynets.2014.257045(186-192)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2014

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