Touch sensing by image analysis of fingernail

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new method to recognize finger contact by image analysis, which does not disturb user’s tactile feeling. When a finger touches a desktop surface, the color pattern of its nail changes from pink to white. The appearance change of the nail can be used to distinguish the finger contact onto a desktop surface by image matching between a camera image and a fingertip image database. Due to high dimensionality of the database, we apply EigenNail method based on principal component analysis (PCA) to realize the quick image matching.