Deep HMResNet Model for Human Activity-Aware Robotic Systems

Endowing the robotic systems with cognitive capabilities for recognizing daily activities of humans is an important challenge, which requires sophisticated and novel approaches. Most of the proposed approaches explore pattern recognition techniques which are generally based on hand-crafted features or learned features. In this paper, a novel Hierarchal Multichannel Deep Residual Network (HMResNet) model is proposed for robotic systems to recognize daily human activities in the ambient environments. The introduced model is comprised of multilevel fusion layers. The proposed Multichannel 1D Deep Residual Network model is, at the features level, combined with a Bottleneck MLP neural network to automatically extract robust features regardless of the hardware configuration and, at the decision level, is fully connected with an MLP neural network to recognize daily human activities. Empirical experiments on real-world datasets and an online demonstration are used for validating the proposed model. Results demonstrated that the proposed model outperforms the baseline models in daily human activity recognition.Comment: Presented at AI-HRI AAAI-FSS, 2018 (arXiv:1809.06606

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