9,126 research outputs found
EgoFace: Egocentric Face Performance Capture and Videorealistic Reenactment
Face performance capture and reenactment techniques use multiple cameras and sensors, positioned at a distance from the face or mounted on heavy wearable devices. This limits their applications in mobile and outdoor environments. We present EgoFace, a radically new lightweight setup for face performance capture and front-view videorealistic reenactment using a single egocentric RGB camera. Our lightweight setup allows operations in uncontrolled environments, and lends itself to telepresence applications such as video-conferencing from dynamic environments. The input image is projected into a low dimensional latent space of the facial expression parameters. Through careful adversarial training of the parameter-space synthetic rendering, a videorealistic animation is produced. Our problem is challenging as the human visual system is sensitive to the smallest face irregularities that could occur in the final results. This sensitivity is even stronger for video results. Our solution is trained in a pre-processing stage, through a supervised manner without manual annotations. EgoFace captures a wide variety of facial expressions, including mouth movements and asymmetrical expressions. It works under varying illuminations, background, movements, handles people from different ethnicities and can operate in real time
Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory Using the SenseCam
Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible
DeepASL: Enabling Ubiquitous and Non-Intrusive Word and Sentence-Level Sign Language Translation
There is an undeniable communication barrier between deaf people and people
with normal hearing ability. Although innovations in sign language translation
technology aim to tear down this communication barrier, the majority of
existing sign language translation systems are either intrusive or constrained
by resolution or ambient lighting conditions. Moreover, these existing systems
can only perform single-sign ASL translation rather than sentence-level
translation, making them much less useful in daily-life communication
scenarios. In this work, we fill this critical gap by presenting DeepASL, a
transformative deep learning-based sign language translation technology that
enables ubiquitous and non-intrusive American Sign Language (ASL) translation
at both word and sentence levels. DeepASL uses infrared light as its sensing
mechanism to non-intrusively capture the ASL signs. It incorporates a novel
hierarchical bidirectional deep recurrent neural network (HB-RNN) and a
probabilistic framework based on Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)
for word-level and sentence-level ASL translation respectively. To evaluate its
performance, we have collected 7,306 samples from 11 participants, covering 56
commonly used ASL words and 100 ASL sentences. DeepASL achieves an average
94.5% word-level translation accuracy and an average 8.2% word error rate on
translating unseen ASL sentences. Given its promising performance, we believe
DeepASL represents a significant step towards breaking the communication
barrier between deaf people and hearing majority, and thus has the significant
potential to fundamentally change deaf people's lives
Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory using the sensecam
Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible
Guidelines for the presentation and visualisation of lifelog content
Lifelogs offer rich voluminous sources of personal and
social data for which visualisation is ideally suited to providing access, overview, and navigation. We explore through examples of our visualisation work within the domain of lifelogging the major axes on which lifelogs operate, and therefore, on which their visualisations should be contingent. We also explore the concept of ‘events’ as a way to significantly reduce the complexity of the lifelog for presentation and make it more human-oriented. Finally we present some guidelines and goals which should be considered when designing presentation modes for lifelog conten
Green multimedia: informing people of their carbon footprint through two simple sensors
In this work we discuss a new, but highly relevant, topic to the multimedia community; systems to inform individuals of their carbon footprint, which could ultimately effect change in community carbon footprint-related activities. The reduction of carbon emissions is now an important policy driver of many governments, and one of the major areas of focus is in reducing the energy demand from the consumers i.e. all of us individually.
In terms of CO2 generated from energy consumption, there are three predominant factors, namely electricity usage, thermal related costs, and transport usage. Standard home electricity and heating sensors can be used to measure the former two aspects, and in this paper we evaluate a novel technique to estimate an individual's transport-related carbon emissions through the use of a simple wearable accelerometer.
We investigate how providing this novel estimation of transport-related carbon emissions through an interactive web site and mobile phone app engages a set of users in becoming more aware of their carbon emissions. Our evaluations involve a group of 6 users collecting 25 million accelerometer readings and 12.5 million power readings vs. a control group of 16 users collecting 29.7 million power readings
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