Investigating pre-touch for sound generation on multi-touch surfaces using blob area detection

We present a method to assist pre-touch on multi-touch surfaces using features extracted from the fingertips of the user's hands. Pixel area a feature obtained from the contour of a fingertip is computed and tracked using commodity cameras to obtain the velocity of approaching fingers. We target sound volume control for digital multi-touch instruments an area where pre-touch is demonstrated with our approach to approximating velocity of finger taps. We explore other areas of application with velocity and how it can help anticipate user actions in mobile touch displays. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, a system prototype was presented to users. We confirmed the satisfactory results by performing the recognition rate experiment for measuring the blob size according to the touch speed.