Abstract: Controlling the Electrical Appliances and Electronic Gadgets through an Infrared Remote Control is now in general. But the same controlling tasks can be done more easily. Primary motive of proposing the new system of Virtual Switch Control is to remove the need to look in to the hand held remote and to search for a specific key for specificfunction. Here we present a novel system to control Various Appliances by just using hand gestures recognition like showing first finger will switch the first device. It uses real time image processing for hand gestures Recognition using a simple web-camera and microcontroller based embedded system. This project/paper proposes a possible solution to control the gadgets for physically challenged or people in industries, who can not touch electric panels too often during their work, so better they just by showing hand gestures , devices get controlled.There will be a computer application designed in MATLAB to have a real time image processing. A web camera giving images to the computer application. After processing the images and recognizing the command for switch, decision data is send to a microcontroller hardware based on AVR environment. This hardware sends the data to the gadgets in same way as a remote control does for general use.To implement the algorithm and its logic for run time image processing, a MATLAB based processing environment is used. To process the images, Image Processing & Acquistion toolboxes are used.

Keywords: Hand gesture recognition, Virtual switch, Image processing, AVR micro-controller, Embedded system.