1,166 research outputs found
When Computer Vision Gazes at Cognition
Joint attention is a core, early-developing form of social interaction. It is
based on our ability to discriminate the third party objects that other people
are looking at. While it has been shown that people can accurately determine
whether another person is looking directly at them versus away, little is known
about human ability to discriminate a third person gaze directed towards
objects that are further away, especially in unconstraint cases where the
looker can move her head and eyes freely. In this paper we address this
question by jointly exploring human psychophysics and a cognitively motivated
computer vision model, which can detect the 3D direction of gaze from 2D face
images. The synthesis of behavioral study and computer vision yields several
interesting discoveries. (1) Human accuracy of discriminating targets
8{\deg}-10{\deg} of visual angle apart is around 40% in a free looking gaze
task; (2) The ability to interpret gaze of different lookers vary dramatically;
(3) This variance can be captured by the computational model; (4) Human
outperforms the current model significantly. These results collectively show
that the acuity of human joint attention is indeed highly impressive, given the
computational challenge of the natural looking task. Moreover, the gap between
human and model performance, as well as the variability of gaze interpretation
across different lookers, require further understanding of the underlying
mechanisms utilized by humans for this challenging task.Comment: Tao Gao and Daniel Harari contributed equally to this wor
A framework for realistic 3D tele-immersion
Meeting, socializing and conversing online with a group of people using teleconferencing systems is still quite differ- ent from the experience of meeting face to face. We are abruptly aware that we are online and that the people we are engaging with are not in close proximity. Analogous to how talking on the telephone does not replicate the experi- ence of talking in person. Several causes for these differences have been identified and we propose inspiring and innova- tive solutions to these hurdles in attempt to provide a more realistic, believable and engaging online conversational expe- rience. We present the distributed and scalable framework REVERIE that provides a balanced mix of these solutions. Applications build on top of the REVERIE framework will be able to provide interactive, immersive, photo-realistic ex- periences to a multitude of users that for them will feel much more similar to having face to face meetings than the expe- rience offered by conventional teleconferencing systems
Refining personal and social presence in virtual meetings
Virtual worlds show promise for conducting meetings and conferences without the need for physical travel. Current experience suggests the major limitation to the more widespread adoption and acceptance of virtual conferences is the failure of existing environments to provide a sense of immersion and engagement, or of ‘being there’. These limitations are largely related to the appearance and control of avatars, and to the absence of means to convey non-verbal cues of facial expression and body language. This paper reports on a study involving the use of a mass-market motion sensor (Kinect™) and the mapping of participant action in the real world to avatar behaviour in the virtual world. This is coupled with full-motion video representation of participant’s faces on their avatars to resolve both identity and facial expression issues. The outcomes of a small-group trial meeting based on this technology show a very positive reaction from participants, and the potential for further exploration of these concepts
EyeScout: Active Eye Tracking for Position and Movement Independent Gaze Interaction with Large Public Displays
While gaze holds a lot of promise for hands-free interaction with public displays, remote eye trackers with their confined tracking box restrict users to a single stationary position in front of the display. We present EyeScout, an active eye tracking system that combines an eye tracker mounted on a rail system with a computational method to automatically detect and align the tracker with the user's lateral movement. EyeScout addresses key limitations of current gaze-enabled large public displays by offering two novel gaze-interaction modes for a single user: In "Walk then Interact" the user can walk up to an arbitrary position in front of the display and interact, while in "Walk and Interact" the user can interact even while on the move. We report on a user study that shows that EyeScout is well perceived by users, extends a public display's sweet spot into a sweet line, and reduces gaze interaction kick-off time to 3.5 seconds -- a 62% improvement over state of the art solutions. We discuss sample applications that demonstrate how EyeScout can enable position and movement-independent gaze interaction with large public displays
Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation in the Wild
Appearance-based gaze estimation is believed to work well in real-world
settings, but existing datasets have been collected under controlled laboratory
conditions and methods have been not evaluated across multiple datasets. In
this work we study appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild. We present the
MPIIGaze dataset that contains 213,659 images we collected from 15 participants
during natural everyday laptop use over more than three months. Our dataset is
significantly more variable than existing ones with respect to appearance and
illumination. We also present a method for in-the-wild appearance-based gaze
estimation using multimodal convolutional neural networks that significantly
outperforms state-of-the art methods in the most challenging cross-dataset
evaluation. We present an extensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art
image-based gaze estimation algorithms on three current datasets, including our
own. This evaluation provides clear insights and allows us to identify key
research challenges of gaze estimation in the wild
- …