Patent ID: 7042442

Claim:
An information input processing computer system for mapping gestures to keys of an invisible virtual keyboard, the system comprising one or several cameras, one or more memories with CPU connected to the cameras, and processes running in the CPU that associate gesture movements made without touching any touch sensors with typing and produce gesture associated textual output, wherein said processes capture gesture images, classify the gesture images into classes, associate each of the classes with one or more possible keys of the invisible keyboard, for each of said classes, assign a probability to each of the possible keys associated with the class, and integrate the probabilities assigned to the possible keys to identify a word for a sequence of gestures; and wherein the processes that integrate the probabilities use one or more of the following: a) language module component that estimate probabilities of word strings corresponding to key candidate sequences; b) character frequency module that estimate probabilities of character strings corresponding key candidate sequences; c) confusable matrix that estimate how often correct gesture classes are confusable with another gesture classes; d) gesture classes probability model that estimate probability of observing a string of gesture classes given a sequence of gesture frames; e) computation of a probability of production a sequence of keys given a string of gesture frames; f) generation of a lattice of sequences of keys given sequence of gesture frames; g) finding the most probable sequence of keys from the lattice of key candidate strings.