Analysis of Hand Segmentation in the Wild

A large number of works in egocentric vision have concentrated on action and object recognition. Detection and segmentation of hands in first-person videos, however, has less been explored. For many applications in this domain, it is necessary to accurately segment not only hands of the camera wearer but also the hands of others with whom he is interacting. Here, we take an in-depth look at the hand segmentation problem. In the quest for robust hand segmentation methods, we evaluated the performance of the state of the art semantic segmentation methods, off the shelf and fine-tuned, on existing datasets. We fine-tune RefineNet, a leading semantic segmentation method, for hand segmentation and find that it does much better than the best contenders. Existing hand segmentation datasets are collected in the laboratory settings. To overcome this limitation, we contribute by collecting two new datasets: a) EgoYouTubeHands including egocentric videos containing hands in the wild, and b) HandOverFace to analyze the performance of our models in presence of similar appearance occlusions. We further explore whether conditional random fields can help refine generated hand segmentations. To demonstrate the benefit of accurate hand maps, we train a CNN for hand-based activity recognition and achieve higher accuracy when a CNN was trained using hand maps produced by the fine-tuned RefineNet. Finally, we annotate a subset of the EgoHands dataset for fine-grained action recognition and show that an accuracy of 58.6% can be achieved by just looking at a single hand pose which is much better than the chance level (12.5%).Comment: Accepted at CVPR 201

Pale Shelter, Cold Hands: Making Criminal Justice Better

In memory of Mona. Inaugural Lecture

Working It Out

[Excerpt] Every steward knows that it’s almost always better to work out problems with management informally, without having to resort to filing a grievance. And ever steward knows that if you do have to file a grievance, it’s better to win it at the first step than have to go through the headaches that come with moving higher up the food chain, or, even worse, risk leaving things in the hands of an arbitrator

Rehabilitation of hand in subacute tetraplegic patients based on brain computer interface and functional electrical stimulation: a randomised pilot study

Objective. To compare neurological and functional outcomes between two groups of hospitalised patients with subacute tetraplegia. Approach. Seven patients received 20 sessions of brain computer interface (BCI) controlled functional electrical stimulation (FES) while five patients received the same number of sessions of passive FES for both hands. The neurological assessment measures were event related desynchronization (ERD) during movement attempt, Somatosensory evoked potential (SSEP) of the ulnar and median nerve; assessment of hand function involved the range of motion (ROM) of wrist and manual muscle test. Main results. Patients in both groups initially had intense ERD during movement attempt that was not restricted to the sensory-motor cortex. Following the treatment, ERD cortical activity restored towards the activity in able-bodied people in BCI-FES group only, remaining wide-spread in FES group. Likewise, SSEP returned in 3 patients in BCI-FES group, having no changes in FES group. The ROM of the wrist improved in both groups. Muscle strength significantly improved for both hands in BCI-FES group. For FES group, a significant improvement was noticed for right hand flexor muscles only. Significance. Combined BCI-FES therapy results in better neurological recovery and better improvement of muscle strength than FES alone. For spinal cord injured patients, BCI-FES should be considered as a therapeutic tool rather than solely a long-term assistive device for the restoration of a lost function

Life is Better with Clean Hands : campaign promotion toolkit

This Global Handwashing Day (October 15) CDC is launching Life is Better with Clean Hands, a new national campaign designed to motivate adults to make clean hands part of their daily lives. Keeping hands clean with soap and water is one of the most important things everyone can do to stay healthy. Studies have shown that handwashing can prevent 1 in 3 diarrhea-related sicknesses and 1 in 5 respiratory infections, such as a cold or the flu.This campaign is aimed at adults, with special emphasis on parents and caregivers. Materials are designed to help raise awareness about the importance of handwashing at key times in both homes and public settings, such as before cooking or after using the bathroom.This material was developed by CDC. The Life is Better with Clean Hands campaign is made possible by a partnership between the CDC Foundation, GOJO, and Staples. HHS/CDC does not endorse commercial products, services, or companies.CS310734APamphlet (or booklet)Publication date from document properties.LifeIsBetterWithCleanHands_CampaignToolkit-p.pdf?deliveryName=USCDC_464-DM11038Campaign Overview -- Promotion and Outreach Suggestions: Public Health Organizations; Public; Parents; Schools; Facility Managers -- Sample Newsletter Announcements -- Digital Graphics -- Sample Social Media Posts -- Online Resources -- Health Observances to Promote Handwashing.2019676