Deep Neural Network and Data Augmentation Methodology for off-axis iris segmentation in wearable headsets

A data augmentation methodology is presented and applied to generate a large dataset of off-axis iris regions and train a low-complexity deep neural network. Although of low complexity the resulting network achieves a high level of accuracy in iris region segmentation for challenging off-axis eye-patches. Interestingly, this network is also shown to achieve high levels of performance for regular, frontal, segmentation of iris regions, comparing favorably with state-of-the-art techniques of significantly higher complexity. Due to its lower complexity, this network is well suited for deployment in embedded applications such as augmented and mixed reality headsets

Algorithm for Monitoring Head/Eye Motion for Driver Alertness with one Camera

Visual methods and systems are described for detecting alterness and vigilance of persons under the conditions of fatigue, lack of sleep, and exposure to mind altering substances such as alcohol or drugs. In particular, the invention can have particular application for truck drivers, bus drivers, train operators, pilots and watercraft controllers and stationary heavy equipment operators, and students and employees during either daytime or nighttime conditions. The invention robustly tracks a person\u27s head and facial features with a single on-board camera with a fully automatic system, that can intitalize automatically, and can reinitialize when it needs to and provide outputs in realtime. The system can classify rotation in all viewing directions, detects eye/mouth occlusion, detects eye blinking, and recovers the 3D (three dimensional) gaze of the eyes. In addition, the system is able to track both through occlusion like eye blinking and through occlusion like rotation. Outputs can be visual and sound alarms to the driver directly..

Unobtrusive and pervasive video-based eye-gaze tracking

Eye-gaze tracking has long been considered a desktop technology that finds its use inside the traditional office setting, where the operating conditions may be controlled. Nonetheless, recent advancements in mobile technology and a growing interest in capturing natural human behaviour have motivated an emerging interest in tracking eye movements within unconstrained real-life conditions, referred to as pervasive eye-gaze tracking. This critical review focuses on emerging passive and unobtrusive video-based eye-gaze tracking methods in recent literature, with the aim to identify different research avenues that are being followed in response to the challenges of pervasive eye-gaze tracking. Different eye-gaze tracking approaches are discussed in order to bring out their strengths and weaknesses, and to identify any limitations, within the context of pervasive eye-gaze tracking, that have yet to be considered by the computer vision community.peer-reviewe

Workers’ Aging Management—Human Fatigue at Work: An Experimental Offices Study

The aging issue in the work context is becoming a significant element of the future sustainability of service and industrial companies. It is well known that with increasing worker age the problem of maintaining the performance and the safety level when fatigue increases is a crucial point, and fatigue increases with the age. Due to social and political developments, especially in Western countries, the retirement age is increasing and companies operate with a higher workforce mean age. Therefore, the problem of recognizing and measuring fatigue has become a key aspect in the management of aging. Note that in the scientific engineering field, the problem of fatigue evaluation when a worker is performing his/her work activities is an important issue in the industrial and service world and especially in the context of the researchers that are investigating the human reliability assessment. As it is clear from the literature, the industrial operations management are suffering from some misleading concepts that only the medicine scientific context can clarify. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to define what are the open issues and the misleading concepts present in the classical fatigue evaluation methods, and second to define two experimental curves of fatigue that will help the decision makers to minimize the impact of fatigue on the workers, thus maximizing the sustainability of the working tasks assigned. This aim is achieved by examining the medical literature about the measurement of a particular kind of fatigue related to the circadian cycle, i.e., the cognitive one; after that, a survey about the possible technologies for measurements is performed. On the basis of technology selection, an experiment on real work activities is performed and some remarkable results about the fatigue in the workers observed and the technology use and its limitations are defined

Assessment of Driver\u27s Attention to Traffic Signs through Analysis of Gaze and Driving Sequences

A driver’s behavior is one of the most significant factors in Advance Driver Assistance Systems. One area that has received little study is just how observant drivers are in seeing and recognizing traffic signs. In this contribution, we present a system considering the location where a driver is looking (points of gaze) as a factor to determine that whether the driver has seen a sign. Our system detects and classifies traffic signs inside the driver’s attentional visual field to identify whether the driver has seen the traffic signs or not. Based on the results obtained from this stage which provides quantitative information, our system is able to determine how observant of traffic signs that drivers are. We take advantage of the combination of Maximally Stable Extremal Regions algorithm and Color information in addition to a binary linear Support Vector Machine classifier and Histogram of Oriented Gradients as features detector for detection. In classification stage, we use a multi class Support Vector Machine for classifier also Histogram of Oriented Gradients for features. In addition to the detection and recognition of traffic signs, our system is capable of determining if the sign is inside the attentional visual field of the drivers. It means the driver has kept his gaze on traffic signs and sees the sign, while if the sign is not inside this area, the driver did not look at the sign and sign has been missed

Enhancing virtual environment-based surgical teamwork training with non-verbal communication

Virtual reality simulations for training surgical skills are increasingly used in medical education and have been shown to improve patient outcome. While advances in hardware and simulation techniques have resulted in many commercial applications for training technical skills, most of these simulators are extremely expensive and do not consider non-technical skills like teamwork and communication. This is a major drawback since recent research suggests that a large percentage of mistakes in clinical settings are due to communication problems. In addition, training teamwork can also improve the efficiency of a surgical team and as such reduce costs and workload. We present an inexpensive camera-based system for capturing aspects of non-verbal communication of users participating in virtual environment-based teamwork simulations. This data can be used for the enhancement of virtual-environment-based simulations to increase the realism and effectiveness of team communication

Direction Estimation Model for Gaze Controlled Systems

Detection of gaze requires estimation of the position and the relation between user’s pupil and glint. This position is mapped into the region of interest using different edge detectors by detecting the glint coordinates and further gaze direction. In this research paper, a Gaze Direction Estimation (GDE) model has been proposed for the comparative analysis of two standard edge detectors Canny and Sobel for estimating automatic detection of the glint, its coordinates and subsequently the gaze direction. The results indicate fairly good percentage of the cases where the correct glint coordinates and subsequently correct gaze direction quadrants have been estimated. These results can further be used for improving the accuracy and performance of different eye gaze based systems