ARM and eyeSight bring gesture recognition to the world of ARM-based devices

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL: eyeSight, producer of the world's most intuitive gesture control, has announced that it has completed extensive work in partnership with ARM to optimize its leading gesture recognition solution for use on ARM's Mali T600 Graphics Processing Units.

Manufacturers using ARM Mali GPUs can now benefit from eyeSight's natural-feeling, advanced gesture control capabilities, optimized using GPU Compute for improved robustness, accuracy and energy efficiency. The improved efficiency of gesture computation through use of the GPU will also improve a variety of new use cases, such as face and emotion detection, long distance finger tracking, and even 3D motion recognition (such as finger pointing for selection).

The ARM Mali T600 GPU Compute optimized engine from eyeSight provides a perfect solution for enabling gesture in mobiles, tablets and TVs and a range of other devices. Products featuring ARM Mali GPUs with eyeSight's gesture solution will allow users to control user interfaces (UIs) and content such as music and movies, to activate usability applications, play games, or to browse menus with easy yet powerful hand and fingertip-level gestures.

With eyeSight's technology, Mali devices can recognise a rich language of gestures including directional gestures, (such as up, right, wave, etc.), hand signs (such as a ‘thumbs-up'), and tracking of hands and even fingertips, (for mouse-cursor-accuracy).

"ARM is excited to be working closely with eyesight to offer our mutual customers advanced gesture recognition technology," commented Pete Hutton, executive vice president and general manager, Media Processing Division, ARM. "The optimization of gesture middleware solutions using Mali GPU Compute in combination with ARM Cortex-A processors using NEONtechnology is an industry first. It enables impressive performance, accuracy, robustness and efficiency. Developers no longer need to worry about processing or ambient limitations as they create the gesture-enabled applications of the future."

"For ARM to have enabled us to optimise our software for use as part of its ARM Mali GPU software stack shows that ARM understands the huge market appeal of our software and of gesture technology more generally, which is quickly becoming a prominent differentiating feature in devices of all kinds," commented Gideon Shmuel, CEO of eyeSight. "By making it easier to integrate gesture into ARM powered devices, eyeSight and ARM are providing a route to really bring gesture to the masses. We look forward to developing our partnership with ARM.'

Low quality video resulting from low light conditions, or slow CPUs, usually results in compromised gesture recognition. However, eyeSight's technology is particularly efficient, and Mali GPUs take processing load away from the CPU. What's more, eyeSight's video pre-processing sits between the camera and the gesture control, ‘cleaning up' the image so that the shapes and movement of hands and fingers can be recognised, even when the original image is substandard, improving overall performance in low-light conditions or when using low-resolution cameras.

With eyeSight's technology on-board, Mali GPUs will also be able to process gesture in three dimensions, via two-camera (‘stereoscopic') devices and devices with infrared (IR) depth perception.