Gesture pre-processing of video stream to reduce platform power

A system for processing a raw video stream, comprising:

• a threshold detection stage comprising integrated circuitry configured to determine if a current frame of the video stream is sufficiently different from a previous frame of the video stream, and in response to the current frame not being sufficiently different than the previous frame, the threshold detection stage is further configured to stop further processing of the current frame by a subsequent stage;
• a target presence stage comprising integrated circuitry configured to determine if the current frame includes skin tone colored pixels, and in response to the current frame not including skin tone colored pixels, the target presence stage is further configured to stop further processing of the current frame by a subsequent stage;
• a segmentation stage configured to receive data from the current frame, and separate pixels of interest from pixels that are not of interest, wherein pixels of interest are represented as blobs and pixels not of interest are represented by non-blobs;
• a hand parser stage that is configured to perform spatial interpretation of blob data received from the segmentation stage;
• and
• a gesture recognition stage that is configured to perform temporal interpretation of blob data received from the hand parser stage and to identify user hand-based navigation gestures;
• wherein the threshold detection, target presence, segmentation, parser, and gesture recognition stages are configured in a stepped and distributed arrangement.