A Generic Framework for Vision Based Interactive Board Games

This paper presents the case that the use of the mouse, joystick or keyboard disrupts the natural flow of board games. It briefly summarises the development of novel interfaces for interactive toys and board games to facilitate natural interactions with a computer. A general framework that integrates real views from camera and virtual views generated by image processing and computer simulation is discussed. The main vision technologies are described in terms of spatial and illumination normalization, skin detection, moving object detection and tracking as well as object classification. An overview of experimental results will be presented which demonstrates that the proposed techniques can be applied in many applications which require real-time and robust object movement detection as part of a gameplay or other interaction. The technology developed works with a lowcost and portable USB web-cam device and has potential applications in a number of areas beyond games.