A low-cost vision based hand gesture interface for real time industrial motor control in resource constrained environments.

Approximately 90% of the information humans acquire from the external world is visual in origin. Nonetheless, the biophysical mechanism underlying the slowly propagating traveling waves observed in cortical tissue has yet to be fully elucidated. In the present work, we propose a biophysical model for visual cognition in terms of distributed synaptic/impressed currents and associated polarization responses in the primary visual cortex (V1) region. Here, we do assume that optical photons, optical frequencies, or optical wave numbers are transmitted through the optic nerve or directly processed by V1. This is because photons are absorbed in retinal photoreceptors, where opsin-mediated phototransduction converts optical input into changes in membrane potential and synaptic release. The signals reaching V1 are therefore electrochemical neural signals, not optical waves. Our model begins at this cortical stage and treats the resulting synaptic/impressed ionic currents as sources of extracellular scalar potentials and associated polarization-field responses. More detailed descriptions of the standard anatomical visual pathway and our model entry point in V1 are given in Fig.  and its caption. Standard anatomical visual pathway and model entry point in V1. Visual information is first converted into electrochemical neural signals in the retina through phototransduction and retinal processing. These include (i) photon absorption by retinal photopigments
electronic transitions, (ii) opsin conformational change, (iii) activation of the G-protein cascade, (iv) modulation of cGMP-gated channels, (v) photoreceptor hyperpolarization, (vi) altered glutamate release, and (vii) On/OFF bipolar cells activation for RGC (retinal ganglion cell) spike control. Integrated RGC signals are transmitted through optic nerve channels. RGC axons partially decussate at the optic chiasm and continue to project through the optic tracts to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Geniculocortical projections then reach the primary visual cortex (V1) the optic radiations. The present model begins at this cortical stage: the input considered here is not the incident optical electromagnetic wave, but the post-retinal, geniculocortically delivered effective cortical input to V1. This effective input is modeled as generating impressed ionic currents, scalar-potential fields, and polarization responses in the cortical medium. The anatomical pathway schematic was adapted from Miquel Perello Nieto, (Wikimedia Commons, 2015), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Modifications include added labels, and explanatory annotations.