25,308 research outputs found
An original framework for understanding human actions and body language by using deep neural networks
The evolution of both fields of Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has allowed the development of efficient automatic systems for the analysis of people's behaviour.
By studying hand movements it is possible to recognize gestures, often used by people to communicate information in a non-verbal way.
These gestures can also be used to control or interact with devices without physically touching them. In particular, sign language and semaphoric hand gestures are the two foremost areas of interest due to their importance in Human-Human Communication (HHC) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), respectively.
While the processing of body movements play a key role in the action recognition and affective computing fields. The former is essential to understand how people act in an environment, while the latter tries to interpret people's emotions based on their poses and movements;
both are essential tasks in many computer vision applications, including event recognition, and video surveillance.
In this Ph.D. thesis, an original framework for understanding Actions and body language is presented. The framework is composed of three main modules: in the first one, a Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs) based method for the Recognition of Sign Language and Semaphoric Hand Gestures is proposed; the second module presents a solution based on 2D skeleton and two-branch stacked LSTM-RNNs for action recognition in video sequences; finally, in the last module, a solution for basic non-acted emotion recognition by using 3D skeleton and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is provided.
The performances of RNN-LSTMs are explored in depth, due to their ability to model the long term contextual information of temporal sequences, making them suitable for analysing body movements.
All the modules were tested by using challenging datasets, well known in the state of the art, showing remarkable results compared to the current literature methods
FSRNet: End-to-End Learning Face Super-Resolution with Facial Priors
Face Super-Resolution (SR) is a domain-specific super-resolution problem. The
specific facial prior knowledge could be leveraged for better super-resolving
face images. We present a novel deep end-to-end trainable Face Super-Resolution
Network (FSRNet), which makes full use of the geometry prior, i.e., facial
landmark heatmaps and parsing maps, to super-resolve very low-resolution (LR)
face images without well-aligned requirement. Specifically, we first construct
a coarse SR network to recover a coarse high-resolution (HR) image. Then, the
coarse HR image is sent to two branches: a fine SR encoder and a prior
information estimation network, which extracts the image features, and
estimates landmark heatmaps/parsing maps respectively. Both image features and
prior information are sent to a fine SR decoder to recover the HR image. To
further generate realistic faces, we propose the Face Super-Resolution
Generative Adversarial Network (FSRGAN) to incorporate the adversarial loss
into FSRNet. Moreover, we introduce two related tasks, face alignment and
parsing, as the new evaluation metrics for face SR, which address the
inconsistency of classic metrics w.r.t. visual perception. Extensive benchmark
experiments show that FSRNet and FSRGAN significantly outperforms state of the
arts for very LR face SR, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Code will be
made available upon publication.Comment: Chen and Tai contributed equally to this pape
A real-time human-robot interaction system based on gestures for assistive scenarios
Natural and intuitive human interaction with robotic systems is a key point to develop robots assisting people in an easy and effective way. In this paper, a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to recognize gestures usually employed in human non-verbal communication is introduced, and an in-depth study of its usability is performed. The system deals with dynamic gestures such as waving or nodding which are recognized using a Dynamic Time Warping approach based on gesture specific features computed from depth maps. A static gesture consisting in pointing at an object is also recognized. The pointed location is then estimated in order to detect candidate objects the user may refer to. When the pointed object is unclear for the robot, a disambiguation procedure by means of either a verbal or gestural dialogue is performed. This skill would lead to the robot picking an object in behalf of the user, which could present difficulties to do it by itself. The overall system — which is composed by a NAO and Wifibot robots, a KinectTM v2 sensor and two laptops — is firstly evaluated in a structured lab setup. Then, a broad set of user tests has been completed, which allows to assess correct performance in terms of recognition rates, easiness of use and response times.Postprint (author's final draft
The Visual Social Distancing Problem
One of the main and most effective measures to contain the recent viral
outbreak is the maintenance of the so-called Social Distancing (SD). To comply
with this constraint, workplaces, public institutions, transports and schools
will likely adopt restrictions over the minimum inter-personal distance between
people. Given this actual scenario, it is crucial to massively measure the
compliance to such physical constraint in our life, in order to figure out the
reasons of the possible breaks of such distance limitations, and understand if
this implies a possible threat given the scene context. All of this, complying
with privacy policies and making the measurement acceptable. To this end, we
introduce the Visual Social Distancing (VSD) problem, defined as the automatic
estimation of the inter-personal distance from an image, and the
characterization of the related people aggregations. VSD is pivotal for a
non-invasive analysis to whether people comply with the SD restriction, and to
provide statistics about the level of safety of specific areas whenever this
constraint is violated. We then discuss how VSD relates with previous
literature in Social Signal Processing and indicate which existing Computer
Vision methods can be used to manage such problem. We conclude with future
challenges related to the effectiveness of VSD systems, ethical implications
and future application scenarios.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. All the authors equally contributed to this
manuscript and they are listed by alphabetical order. Under submissio
Simultaneous Facial Landmark Detection, Pose and Deformation Estimation under Facial Occlusion
Facial landmark detection, head pose estimation, and facial deformation
analysis are typical facial behavior analysis tasks in computer vision. The
existing methods usually perform each task independently and sequentially,
ignoring their interactions. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified
framework for simultaneous facial landmark detection, head pose estimation, and
facial deformation analysis, and the proposed model is robust to facial
occlusion. Following a cascade procedure augmented with model-based head pose
estimation, we iteratively update the facial landmark locations, facial
occlusion, head pose and facial de- formation until convergence. The
experimental results on benchmark databases demonstrate the effectiveness of
the proposed method for simultaneous facial landmark detection, head pose and
facial deformation estimation, even if the images are under facial occlusion.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition,
201
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