Patent ID: 8773352

Claim:
A system for providing gesture information associated with a target, comprising; a first infrared (IR) light emitting element disposed to emit light in an IR wavelength band towards a target; an imaging module including a digital camera element, the digital camera element including a single complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) or a charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor having image sensor pixel elements disposed on a grid of pixels in a single plane, the digital camera element configured to detect and distinguish red, green, and blue human-visible light in a visible light wavelength band and IR light in an IR wavelength band using the image sensor pixel elements, the image sensor configured to: simultaneously detect IR light in the IR wavelength band with the infrared pixel elements and human-visible light in the visible light wavelength band with the image sensor pixel elements; and capture the detected IR light in the IR wavelength band that is emitted from the first light emitting element and reflected from the target; wherein the imaging module is further configured to generate one or more frames of IR image data based at least in part on the detected IR light captured with the image sensor; a display screen disposed to display a graphical user interface towards the target independently of IR light emitted from the first IR light emitting element, the graphical user interface providing a display of a user-controllable graphical user interface control element; and a processing module including a memory and processor, said processing module operably coupled to the imaging module and configured to: receive the one or more frames of IR image data; generate output data based at least in part on said one or more frames of IR image data, said output data including data associated with a position or motion of the target; and store the output data in a memory; a user interface control module operably coupled to the memory and processor and configured to: perform gesture recognition on the output data to identify a defined gesture made by the target; correlate the defined gesture with an interaction to control the graphical user interface control element displayed in the graphical user interface; and perform the interaction with the graphical user interface control element displayed in the graphical user interface based on the defined gesture.