The Potential of Fusing Computer Vision and Depth Sensing for Accurate Distance Estimation

Accurately inferring the distance between the user and the interface enables the design of a variety of proximity-aware user interfaces. This paper reports our work-in-progress on designing a toolkit called SpiderEyes that will enable systems to accurately estimate the distance between the user and the interface by fusing computer vision with depth sensing. Potential advantages of this approach include increased accuracy and the ability to reliably estimate the user’s distance to the interface even when the user is far from the sensor (up to five metres). We evaluated the feasibility of this approach in a controlled experiment and found that it is likely to yield distance estimations with less than a 10 cm estimation error when users are between 50 cm and 5 metres away from the system