PCSignalCMD – Control your PC mouse with gestures

Posted by eyalw | Filed under Projects

PCSignalCMD is a software that I developed as my final year project in hischool when I was 17 [2005]. SigncalCMD allows you to control your computer with gestures committed by your mouse – simply put, drawing “C” can open drive C, and drawing spiral can open your email client…  No matter what you’re doing at the moment on your PC, dragging the mouse middle click and drawing a shape will trigger the corresponding event attached to it (which may be launching an application, opening a website, or others..).

The software is based on the algorithmic ability of recognizing vectorized shapes (shapes defined by a series of points, and <x, y> coordinates) – that means being able to distinguish between shapes. For example, If we have a collection of predefined shapes (circle, triangle, spiral, rectangle, …), and given a new shape as input, decide to which shape from the collection it’s most similar to.

After I was done with SignalCMD, I went on enhancing the algorithm and teach it to read hand written lines of text [specifically in Hebrew], a software commonly know as Transcriber. Although this problem may seem similar at first glance, its quite harder than it appears. Several problems arise:

  • Multi-stroke letters – Some letters are composed of 2 or 3 unconnected lines/strokes. When a series of characters is written in a crowded fashion, it is hard to decide which sub-group of lines makes up which letter.
  • Position/size dependent letters – Some characters meaning can only be determined according to their relative position from the line, and/or their relative size to the line height – in hebrew this is especially the case, as you can see from the image below – 5 vector-identical shapes that correspond to 5 different characters, all because of their different size/position.

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Permalink | Comments (0) | Oct 24, 2010