Hand gesture recognition in uncontrolled environments

Human Computer Interaction has been relying on mechanical devices to feed information into computers with low efficiency for a long time. With the recent developments in image processing and machine learning methods, the computer vision community is ready to develop the next generation of Human Computer Interaction methods, including Hand Gesture Recognition methods. A comprehensive Hand Gesture Recognition based semantic level Human Computer Interaction framework for uncontrolled environments is proposed in this thesis. The framework contains novel methods for Hand Posture Recognition, Hand Gesture Recognition and Hand Gesture Spotting. The Hand Posture Recognition method in the proposed framework is capable of recognising predefined still hand postures from cluttered backgrounds. Texture features are used in conjunction with Adaptive Boosting to form a novel feature selection scheme, which can effectively detect and select discriminative texture features from the training samples of the posture classes. A novel Hand Tracking method called Adaptive SURF Tracking is proposed in this thesis. Texture key points are used to track multiple hand candidates in the scene. This tracking method matches texture key points of hand candidates within adjacent frames to calculate the movement directions of hand candidates. With the gesture trajectories provided by the Adaptive SURF Tracking method, a novel classi�er called Partition Matrix is introduced to perform gesture classification for uncontrolled environments with multiple hand candidates. The trajectories of all hand candidates extracted from the original video under different frame rates are used to analyse the movements of hand candidates. An alternative gesture classifier based on Convolutional Neural Network is also proposed. The input images of the Neural Network are approximate trajectory images reconstructed from the tracking results of the Adaptive SURF Tracking method. For Hand Gesture Spotting, a forward spotting scheme is introduced to detect the starting and ending points of the prede�ned gestures in the continuously signed gesture videos. A Non-Sign Model is also proposed to simulate meaningless hand movements between the meaningful gestures. The proposed framework can perform well with unconstrained scene settings, including frontal occlusions, background distractions and changing lighting conditions. Moreover, it is invariant to changing scales, speed and locations of the gesture trajectories

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

Effective Identity Management on Mobile Devices Using Multi-Sensor Measurements

Due to the dramatic increase in popularity of mobile devices in the past decade, sensitive user information is stored and accessed on these devices every day. Securing sensitive data stored and accessed from mobile devices, makes user-identity management a problem of paramount importance. The tension between security and usability renders the task of user-identity verification on mobile devices challenging. Meanwhile, an appropriate identity management approach is missing since most existing technologies for user-identity verification are either one-shot user verification or only work in restricted controlled environments. To solve the aforementioned problems, we investigated and sought approaches from the sensor data generated by human-mobile interactions. The data are collected from the on-board sensors, including voice data from microphone, acceleration data from accelerometer, angular acceleration data from gyroscope, magnetic force data from magnetometer, and multi-touch gesture input data from touchscreen. We studied the feasibility of extracting biometric and behaviour features from the on-board sensor data and how to efficiently employ the features extracted to perform user-identity verification on the smartphone device. Based on the experimental results of the single-sensor modalities, we further investigated how to integrate them with hardware such as fingerprint and Trust Zone to practically fulfill a usable identity management system for both local application and remote services control. User studies and on-device testing sessions were held for privacy and usability evaluation.Computer Science, Department o

RGBD Datasets: Past, Present and Future

Since the launch of the Microsoft Kinect, scores of RGBD datasets have been released. These have propelled advances in areas from reconstruction to gesture recognition. In this paper we explore the field, reviewing datasets across eight categories: semantics, object pose estimation, camera tracking, scene reconstruction, object tracking, human actions, faces and identification. By extracting relevant information in each category we help researchers to find appropriate data for their needs, and we consider which datasets have succeeded in driving computer vision forward and why. Finally, we examine the future of RGBD datasets. We identify key areas which are currently underexplored, and suggest that future directions may include synthetic data and dense reconstructions of static and dynamic scenes.Comment: 8 pages excluding references (CVPR style