ABSTRACT
The whole world has been witnessing the gigantic enemy in the form of COVID-19 since March 2020. With its super-fast spread, it has devastated a major part of the world and found to be the most dangerous virus of the 21st Century. All countries went into a lockdown to control the spread of the virus, and the economy dropped down to an all- time low index. The major guideline to avoid the spread of diseases like COVID- 19 at work is avoiding contact with people and their belongings. It is not safe to use computing devices because it may result in the spread of the virus by touching them. This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence- based virtual mouse that detects or recognizes hand gestures to control the various functions of a personal computer. The virtual mouse Algorithm uses a webcam or a built-in camera of the system to capture hand gestures, then uses an algorithm to detect the palm boundaries similar to that of the face detection model of the media pipe face mesh algorithm. After tracing the palm boundaries, it uses a regression model and locates the 21 3D hand-knuckle coordinate points inside the recognized hand/palm boundaries. Once the Hand Landmarks are detected, they are used to call windows Application Programming Interface (API) functions to control the functionalities of the system. The proposed algorithm is tested for volume control and cursor control in a laptop with the Windows operating system and a webcam. The proposedsystem took only 1ms to identify the gestures and control the volume and cursor in real-time. © 2023 IEEE.