\documentclass[twoside,openright]{uva-bachelor-thesis} \usepackage[english]{babel} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage{hyperref,graphicx,float,tikz} \usetikzlibrary{shapes,arrows} % Link colors \hypersetup{colorlinks=true,linkcolor=black,urlcolor=blue,citecolor=DarkGreen} % Title Page \title{A universal detection mechanism for multi-touch gestures} \author{Taddeüs Kroes} \supervisors{Dr. Robert G. Belleman (UvA)} \signedby{Dr. Robert G. Belleman (UvA)} \begin{document} % Title page \maketitle \begin{abstract} % TODO \end{abstract} % Set paragraph indentation \parindent 0pt \parskip 1.5ex plus 0.5ex minus 0.2ex % Table of contant on separate page \tableofcontents \chapter{Introduction} % Ruwe probleemstelling Multi-touch interaction is becoming increasingly common, mostly due to the wide use of touch screens in phones and tablets. When programming applications using this method of interaction, the programmer needs an abstraction of the raw data provided by the touch driver of the device. This abstraction exists in several multi-touch application frameworks like Nokia's Qt\footnote{\url{http://qt.nokia.com/}}. However, applications that do not use these frameworks have no access to their multi-touch events. % Aanleiding This problem was observed during an attempt to create a multi-touch ``interactor'' class for the Visualization Toolkit \cite[VTK]{VTK}. Because VTK provides the application framework here, it is undesirable to use an entire framework like Qt simultaneously only for its multi-touch support. % Ruw doel The goal of this project is to define a universal multi-touch event triggering mechanism. To test the definition, a reference implementation is written in Python. % Setting To test multi-touch interaction properly, a multi-touch device is required. The University of Amsterdam (UvA) has provided access to a multi-touch table from PQlabs. The table uses the TUIO protocol \cite{TUIO} to communicate touch events. \section{Definition of the problem} % Hoofdvraag The goal of this thesis is to create a multi-touch event triggering mechanism for use in a VTK interactor. The design of the mechanism must be universal. % Deelvragen To design such a mechanism properly, the following questions are relevant: \begin{itemize} \item What is the input of the mechanism? Different touch drivers have different API's. To be able to support different drivers (which is highly desirable), there should probably be a translation from the driver API to a fixed input format. \item How can extendability be accomplished? The set of supported events should not be limited to a single implementation, but an application should be able to define its own custom events. \item How can the mechanism be used by different programming languages? A universal mechanism should not be limited to be used in only one language. \item Can events be shared with multiple processes at the same time? For example, a network implementation could run as a service instead of within a single application, triggering events in any application that needs them. % FIXME: gaan we nog wat doen met onderstaand? %\item Is performance an issue? For example, an event loop with rotation % detection could swallow up more processing resources than desired. \item How can the mechanism be integrated in a VTK interactor? \end{itemize} % Afbakening The scope of this thesis includes the design of a universal multi-touch triggering mechanism, a reference implementation of this design, and its integration into a VTK interactor. To be successful, the design should allow for extensions to be added to any implementation. The reference implementation is a Proof of Concept that translates TUIO events to some simple touch gestures that are used by a VTK interactor. Being a Proof of Concept, the reference implementation itself does not necessarily need to meet all the requirements of the design. \section{Structure of this document} % TODO: pas als het klaar is \chapter{Related work} \section{Gesture and Activity Recognition Toolkit} The Gesture and Activity Recognition Toolkit (GART) \cite{GART} is a toolkit for the development of gesture-based applications. The toolkit states that the best way to classify gestures is to use machine learning. The programmer trains a program to recognize using the machine learning library from the toolkit. The toolkit contains a callback-mechanism that the programmer uses to execute custom code when a gesture is recognized. Though multi-touch input is not directly supported by the toolkit, the level of abstraction does allow for it to be implemented in the form of a ``touch'' sensor. The reason to use machine learning is the statement that gesture detection ``is likely to become increasingly complex and unmanageable'' when using a set of predefined rules to detect whether some sensor input can be seen as a specific gesture. This statement is not necessarily true. If the programmer is given a way to separate the detection of different types of gestures and flexibility in rule definitions, over-complexity can be avoided. % oplossing: trackers. bijv. TapTracker, TransformationTracker gescheiden \section{Gesture recognition software for Windows 7} % TODO The online article \cite{win7touch} presents a Windows 7 application, written in Microsofts .NET. The application shows detected gestures in a canvas. Gesture trackers keep track of stylus locations to detect specific gestures. The event types required to track a touch stylus are ``stylus down'', ``stylus move'' and ``stylus up'' events. A \texttt{GestureTrackerManager} object dispatches these events to gesture trackers. The application supports a limited number of pre-defined gestures. An important observation in this application is that different gestures are detected by different gesture trackers, thus separating gesture detection code into maintainable parts. \section{Processing implementation of simple gestures in Android} An implementation of a detection mechanism for some simple multi-touch gestures (tap, double tap, rotation, pinch and drag) using Processing\footnote{Processing is a Java-based development environment with an export possibility for Android. See also \url{http://processing.org/.}} can be found found in a forum on the Processing website \cite{processingMT}. The implementation is fairly simple, but it yields some very appealing results. The detection logic of all gestures is combined in a single class. This does not allow for extendability, because the complexity of this class would increase to an undesirable level (as predicted by the GART article \cite{GART}). However, the detection logic itself is partially re-used in the reference implementation of the universal gesture detection mechanism. \chapter{Preliminary} \section{The TUIO protocol} \label{sec:tuio} The TUIO protocol \cite{TUIO} defines a way to geometrically describe tangible objects, such as fingers or fiducials on a multi-touch table. The table used for this thesis uses the protocol in its driver. Object information is sent to the TUIO UDP port (3333 by default). For efficiency reasons, the TUIO protocol is encoded using the Open Sound Control \cite[OSC]{OSC} format. An OSC server/client implementation is available for Python: pyOSC \cite{pyOSC}. A Python implementation of the TUIO protocol also exists: pyTUIO \cite{pyTUIO}. However, the execution of an example script yields an error regarding Python's built-in \texttt{socket} library. Therefore, the reference implementation uses the pyOSC package to receive TUIO messages. The two most important message types of the protocol are ALIVE and SET messages. An ALIVE message contains the list of session id's that are currently ``active'', which in the case of multi-touch a table means that they are touching the screen. A SET message provides geometric information of a session id, such as position, velocity and acceleration. Each session id represents an object. The only type of objects on the multi-touch table are what the TUIO protocol calls ``2DCur'', which is a (x, y) position on the screen. ALIVE messages can be used to determine when an object touches and releases the screen. For example, if a session id was in the previous message but not in the current, The object it represents has been lifted from the screen. SET provide information about movement. In the case of simple (x, y) positions, only the movement vector of the position itself can be calculated. For more complex objects such as fiducials, arguments like rotational position is also included. ALIVE and SET messages can be combined to create ``point down'', ``point move'' and ``point up'' events (as used by the \cite[.NET application]{win7touch}). TUIO coordinates range from $0.0$ to $1.0$, with $(0.0, 0.0)$ being the left top corner of the screen and $(1.0, 1.0)$ the right bottom corner. To focus events within a window, a translation to window coordinates is required in the client application, as stated by the online specification \cite{TUIO_specification}: \begin{quote} In order to compute the X and Y coordinates for the 2D profiles a TUIO tracker implementation needs to divide these values by the actual sensor dimension, while a TUIO client implementation consequently can scale these values back to the actual screen dimension. \end{quote} \section{The Visualization Toolkit} \label{sec:vtk} % TODO \chapter{Experiments} % testimplementatie met taps, rotatie en pinch. Hieruit bleek: % - dat er verschillende manieren zijn om bijv. "rotatie" te % detecteren, (en dat daartussen onderscheid moet kunnen worden % gemaakt) % - dat detectie van verschillende soorten gestures moet kunnen % worden gescheiden, anders wordt het een chaos. % - Er zijn een aantal keuzes gemaakt bij het ontwerpen van de gestures, % bijv dat rotatie ALLE vingers gebruikt voor het centroid. Het is % wellicht in een ander programma nodig om maar 1 hand te gebruiken, en % dus punten dicht bij elkaar te kiezen (oplossing: windows). % Tekenprogramma dat huidige points + centroid tekent en waarmee % transformatie kan worden getest Link naar appendix "supported events" % Proof of Concept: VTK interactor \section{Experimenting with TUIO and event bindings} \label{sec:experimental-draw} When designing a software library, its API should be understandable and easy to use for programmers. To find out the basic requirements of the API to be usable, an experimental program has been written based on the Processing code from \cite{processingMT}. The program receives TUIO events and translates them to point \emph{down}, \emph{move} and \emph{up} events. These events are then interpreted to be (double or single) \emph{tap}, \emph{rotation} or \emph{pinch} gestures. A simple drawing program then draws the current state to the screen using the PyGame library. The output of the program can be seen in figure \ref{fig:draw}. \begin{figure}[H] \center \label{fig:draw} \includegraphics[scale=0.4]{data/experimental_draw.png} \caption{Output of the experimental drawing program. It draws the touch points and their centroid on the screen (the centroid is used as center point for rotation and pinch detection). It also draws a green rectangle which responds to rotation and pinch events.} \end{figure} One of the first observations is the fact that TUIO's \texttt{SET} messages use the TUIO coordinate system, as described in section \ref{sec:tuio}. The test program multiplies these with its own dimensions, thus showing the entire screen in its window. Also, the implementation only works using the TUIO protocol. Other drivers are not supported. Though using relatively simple math, the rotation and pinch events work surprisingly well. Both rotation and pinch use the centroid of all touch points. A \emph{rotation} gesture uses the difference in angle relative to the centroid of all touch points, and \emph{pinch} uses the difference in distance. Both values are normalized using division by the number of touch points. A pinch event contains a scale factor, and therefore uses a division of the current by the previous average distance to the centroid. There is a flaw in this implementation. Since the centroid is calculated using all current touch points, there cannot be two or more rotation or pinch gestures simultaneously. On a large multi-touch table, it is desirable to support interaction with multiple hands, or multiple persons, at the same time. Also, the different detection algorithms are all implemented in the same file, making it complex to read or debug, and difficult to extend. \section{VTK interactor} % TODO % VTK heeft eigen pipeline, mechanisme moet daarnaast draaien \section{Summary of observations} \label{sec:observations} \begin{itemize} \item The TUIO protocol uses a distinctive coordinate system and set of messages. \item Touch events occur outside of the application window. \item Gestures that use multiple touch points are using all touch points (not a subset of them). \item Code complexity increases when detection algorithms are added. \item % TODO: VTK interactor observations \end{itemize} % ------- % Results % ------- \chapter{Design} \section{Requirements} \label{sec:requirements} From the observations in section \ref{sec:observations}, a number of requirements can be specified for the design of the event mechanism: \begin{itemize} % vertalen driver-specifieke events naar algemeen formaat \item To be able to support multiple input drivers, there must be a translation from driver-specific messages to some common format that can be used in gesture detection algorithms. % events toewijzen aan GUI window (windows) \item An application GUI window should be able to receive only events occuring within that window, and not outside of it. % scheiden groepen touchpoints voor verschillende gestures (windows) \item To support multiple objects that are performing different gestures at the same time, the mechanism must be able to perform gesture detection on a subset of the active touch points. % scheiden van detectiecode voor verschillende gesture types \item To avoid an increase in code complexity when adding new detection algorithms, detection code of different gesture types must be separated. \end{itemize} \section{Components} Based on the requirements from section \ref{sec:requirements}, a design for the mechanism has been created. The design consists of a number of components, each having a specific set of tasks. \subsection{Event server} % vertaling driver naar point down, move, up % vertaling naar schermpixelcoordinaten % TUIO in reference implementation The \emph{event server} is an abstraction for driver-specific server implementations, such as a TUIO server. It receives driver-specific messages and tanslates these to a common set of events and a common coordinate system. A minimal example of a common set of events is $\{point\_down, point\_move, point\_up\}$. This is the set used by the reference implementation. Respectively, these events represent an object being placed on the screen, moving along the surface of the screen, and being released from the screen. A more extended set could also contain the same three events for a surface touching the screen. However, a surface can have a rotational property, like the ``fiducials'' type in the TUIO protocol. This results in as $\{point\_down, point\_move, point\_up, surface\_down, surface\_move, surface\_up,\\surface\_rotate\}$. An important note here, is that similar events triggered by different event servers must have the same event type and parameters. In other words, the output of the event servers should be determined by the gesture servers (not the contrary). The output of an event server implementation should also use a common coordinate system, that is the coordinate system used by the gesture server. For example, the reference implementation uses screen coordinates in pixels, where (0, 0) is the upper left corner of the screen. The abstract class definition of the event server should provide some functionality to detect which driver-specific event server implementation should be used. \subsection{Gesture trackers} A \emph{gesture tracker} detects a single gesture type, given a set of touch points. If one group of points on the screen is assigned to one tracker and another group to another tracker, multiple gestures, an be detected at the same time. For this assignment, the mechanism uses windows. These will be described in the next section. % event binding/triggering A gesture tracker triggers a gesture event by executing a callback. Callbacks are ``bound'' to a tracker by the application. Because multiple gesture types can have very similar detection algorithm, a tracker can detect multiple different types of gestures. For instance, the rotation and pinch gestures from the experimental program in section \ref{sec:experimental-draw} both use the centroid of all touch points. If no callback is bound for a particular gesture type, no detection of that type is needed. A tracker implementation can use this knowledge for code optimization. % scheiding algoritmiek A tracker implementation defines the gesture types it can trigger, and the detection algorithms to trigger them. Consequently, detection algorithms can be separated in different trackers. Different trackers can be saved in different files, reducing the complexity of the code in a single file. \\ % extendability Because tacker defines its own set of gesture types, the application developer can define application-specific trackers (by extending a base \texttt{GestureTracker} class, for example). In fact, any built-in gesture trackers of an implementation are also created this way. This allows for a plugin-like way of programming, which is very desirable if someone would want to build a library of gesture trackers. Such a library can easy be extended by others. \subsection{Windows} A \emph{window} represents a subset of the entire screen surface. The goal of a window is to restrict the detection of certain gestures to certain areas. A window contains a list of touch points, and a list of trackers. A window server (defined in the next section) assigns touch points to a window, but the window itself defines functionality to check whether a touch point is inside the window. This way, new windows can be defined to fit over any 2D object used by the application. The first and most obvious use of a window is to restrict touch events to a single application window. However, the use of windows can be used in a lot more powerful way. For example, an application contains an image with a transparent background that can be dragged around. The user can only drag the image by touching its foreground. To accomplish this, the application programmer can define a window type that uses a bitmap to determine whether a touch point is on the visible image surface. The tracker which detects drag gestures is then bound to this window, limiting the occurence of drag events to the image surface. % toewijzen even aan deel v/h scherm: % TUIO coördinaten zijn over het hele scherm en van 0.0 tot 1.0, dus % moeten worden vertaald naar pixelcoördinaten binnen een ``window'' % TODO \subsection{Gesture server} % luistert naar point down, move, up The \emph{gesture server} delegates events from the event server to the set of windows that contain the touch points related to the events. % toewijzing point (down) aan window(s) The gesture server contains a list of windows. When the event server triggers an event, the gesture server ``asks'' each window whether it contains the related touch point. If so, the window updates its gesture trackers, which can then trigger gestures. \section{Diagram of component relations} \begin{figure}[H] \input{data/diagram} % TODO: caption \end{figure} \section{Example usage} % TODO % vertellen hoe je tracker aanmaakt, binnen een window %\section{Network protocol} % TODO % ZeroMQ gebruiken voor communicatie tussen meerdere processen (in % verschillende talen) \chapter{Reference implementation} % TODO % alleen window.contains op point down, niet move/up \chapter{Integration in VTK} % VTK interactor %\chapter{Conclusions} % TODO % Windows zijn een manier om globale events toe te wijzen aan vensters % Trackers zijn een effectieve manier om gebaren te detecteren % Trackers zijn uitbreidbaar door object-orientatie \chapter{Suggestions for future work} % TODO % Network protocol (ZeroMQ) voor meerdere talen en simultane processen % Hierij ook: extra laag die gesture windows aanmaakt die corresponderen met window manager % State machine % Window in boomstructuur voor efficientie \bibliographystyle{plain} \bibliography{report}{} %\appendix \end{document}