3D hand tracking.

The hand is often considered as one of the most natural and intuitive interaction modalities for human-to-human interaction. In human-computer interaction (HCI), proper 3D hand tracking is the first step in developing a more intuitive HCI system which can be used in applications such as gesture recognition, virtual object manipulation and gaming. However, accurate 3D hand tracking, remains a challenging problem due to the hand’s deformation, appearance similarity, high inter-finger occlusion and complex articulated motion. Further, 3D hand tracking is also interesting from a theoretical point of view as it deals with three major areas of computer vision- segmentation (of hand), detection (of hand parts), and tracking (of hand). This thesis proposes a region-based skin color detection technique, a model-based and an appearance-based 3D hand tracking techniques to bring the human-computer interaction applications one step closer. All techniques are briefly described below. Skin color provides a powerful cue for complex computer vision applications. Although skin color detection has been an active research area for decades, the mainstream technology is based on individual pixels. This thesis presents a new region-based technique for skin color detection which outperforms the current state-of-the-art pixel-based skin color detection technique on the popular Compaq dataset (Jones & Rehg 2002). The proposed technique achieves 91.17% true positive rate with 13.12% false negative rate on the Compaq dataset tested over approximately 14,000 web images. Hand tracking is not a trivial task as it requires tracking of 27 degreesof- freedom of hand. Hand deformation, self occlusion, appearance similarity and irregular motion are major problems that make 3D hand tracking a very challenging task. This thesis proposes a model-based 3D hand tracking technique, which is improved by using proposed depth-foreground-background ii feature, palm deformation module and context cue. However, the major problem of model-based techniques is, they are computationally expensive. This can be overcome by discriminative techniques as described below. Discriminative techniques (for example random forest) are good for hand part detection, however they fail due to sensor noise and high interfinger occlusion. Additionally, these techniques have difficulties in modelling kinematic or temporal constraints. Although model-based descriptive (for example Markov Random Field) or generative (for example Hidden Markov Model) techniques utilize kinematic and temporal constraints well, they are computationally expensive and hardly recover from tracking failure. This thesis presents a unified framework for 3D hand tracking, using the best of both methodologies, which out performs the current state-of-the-art 3D hand tracking techniques. The proposed 3D hand tracking techniques in this thesis can be used to extract accurate hand movement features and enable complex human machine interaction such as gaming and virtual object manipulation

A preliminary study of micro-gestures:dataset collection and analysis with multi-modal dynamic networks

Abstract. Micro-gestures (MG) are gestures that people performed spontaneously during communication situations. A preliminary exploration of Micro-Gesture is made in this thesis. By collecting recorded sequences of body gestures in a spontaneous state during games, a MG dataset is built through Kinect V2. A novel term ‘micro-gesture’ is proposed by analyzing the properties of MG dataset. Implementations of two sets of neural network architectures are achieved for micro-gestures segmentation and recognition task, which are the DBN-HMM model and the 3DCNN-HMM model for skeleton data and RGB-D data respectively. We also explore a method for extracting neutral states used in the HMM structure by detecting the activity level of the gesture sequences. The method is simple to derive and implement, and proved to be effective. The DBN-HMM and 3DCNN-HMM architectures are evaluated on MG dataset and optimized for the properties of micro-gestures. Experimental results show that we are able to achieve micro-gesture segmentation and recognition with satisfied accuracy with these two models. The work we have done about the micro-gestures in this thesis also explores a new research path for gesture recognition. Therefore, we believe that our work could be widely used as a baseline for future research on micro-gestures

A spatially distributed model for foreground segmentation

Foreground segmentation is a fundamental first processing stage for vision systems which monitor real-world activity. In this paper we consider the problem of achieving robust segmentation in scenes where the appearance of the background varies unpredictably over time. Variations may be caused by processes such as moving water, or foliage moved by wind, and typically degrade the performance of standard per-pixel background models. Our proposed approach addresses this problem by modeling homogeneous regions of scene pixels as an adaptive mixture of Gaussians in color and space. Model components are used to represent both the scene background and moving foreground objects. Newly observed pixel values are probabilistically classified, such that the spatial variance of the model components supports correct classification even when the background appearance is significantly distorted. We evaluate our method over several challenging video sequences, and compare our results with both per-pixel and Markov Random Field based models. Our results show the effectiveness of our approach in reducing incorrect classifications

Human Action Recognition Using Deep Probabilistic Graphical Models

Building intelligent systems that are capable of representing or extracting high-level representations from high-dimensional sensory data lies at the core of solving many A.I. related tasks. Human action recognition is an important topic in computer vision that lies in high-dimensional space. Its applications include robotics, video surveillance, human-computer interaction, user interface design, and multi-media video retrieval amongst others. A number of approaches have been proposed to extract representative features from high-dimensional temporal data, most commonly hard wired geometric or bio-inspired shape context features. This thesis first demonstrates some \emph{ad-hoc} hand-crafted rules for effectively encoding motion features, and later elicits a more generic approach for incorporating structured feature learning and reasoning, \ie deep probabilistic graphical models. The hierarchial dynamic framework first extracts high level features and then uses the learned representation for estimating emission probability to infer action sequences. We show that better action recognition can be achieved by replacing gaussian mixture models by Deep Neural Networks that contain many layers of features to predict probability distributions over states of Markov Models. The framework can be easily extended to include an ergodic state to segment and recognise actions simultaneously. The first part of the thesis focuses on analysis and applications of hand-crafted features for human action representation and classification. We show that the ``hard coded" concept of correlogram can incorporate correlations between time domain sequences and we further investigate multi-modal inputs, \eg depth sensor input and its unique traits for action recognition. The second part of this thesis focuses on marrying probabilistic graphical models with Deep Neural Networks (both Deep Belief Networks and Deep 3D Convolutional Neural Networks) for structured sequence prediction. The proposed Deep Dynamic Neural Network exhibits its general framework for structured 2D data representation and classification. This inspires us to further investigate for applying various graphical models for time-variant video sequences

Infinite Hidden Conditional Random Fields for the Recognition of Human Behaviour

While detecting and interpreting temporal patterns of nonverbal behavioral cues in a given context is a natural and often unconscious process for humans, it remains a rather difficult task for computer systems. In this thesis we are primarily motivated by the problem of recognizing expressions of high--level behavior, and specifically agreement and disagreement. We thoroughly dissect the problem by surveying the nonverbal behavioral cues that could be present during displays of agreement and disagreement; we discuss a number of methods that could be used or adapted to detect these suggested cues; we list some publicly available databases these tools could be trained on for the analysis of spontaneous, audiovisual instances of agreement and disagreement, we examine the few existing attempts at agreement and disagreement classification, and we discuss the challenges in automatically detecting agreement and disagreement. We present experiments that show that an existing discriminative graphical model, the Hidden Conditional Random Field (HCRF) is the best performing on this task. The HCRF is a discriminative latent variable model which has been previously shown to successfully learn the hidden structure of a given classification problem (provided an appropriate validation of the number of hidden states). We show here that HCRFs are also able to capture what makes each of these social attitudes unique. We present an efficient technique to analyze the concepts learned by the HCRF model and show that these coincide with the findings from social psychology regarding which cues are most prevalent in agreement and disagreement. Our experiments are performed on a spontaneous expressions dataset curated from real televised debates. The HCRF model outperforms conventional approaches such as Hidden Markov Models and Support Vector Machines. Subsequently, we examine existing graphical models that use Bayesian nonparametrics to have a countably infinite number of hidden states and adapt their complexity to the data at hand. We identify a gap in the literature that is the lack of a discriminative such graphical model and we present our suggestion for the first such model: an HCRF with an infinite number of hidden states, the Infinite Hidden Conditional Random Field (IHCRF). In summary, the IHCRF is an undirected discriminative graphical model for sequence classification and uses a countably infinite number of hidden states. We present two variants of this model. The first is a fully nonparametric model that relies on Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo inference approach. The second is a semi--parametric model that uses Dirichlet Process Mixtures and relies on a mean--field variational inference approach. We show that both models are able to converge to a correct number of represented hidden states, and perform as well as the best finite HCRFs ---chosen via cross--validation--- for the difficult tasks of recognizing instances of agreement, disagreement, and pain in audiovisual sequences.Open Acces

Personalized face and gesture analysis using hierarchical neural networks

The video-based computational analyses of human face and gesture signals encompass a myriad of challenging research problems involving computer vision, machine learning and human computer interaction. In this thesis, we focus on the following challenges: a) the classification of hand and body gestures along with the temporal localization of their occurrence in a continuous stream, b) the recognition of facial expressivity levels in people with Parkinson's Disease using multimodal feature representations, c) the prediction of student learning outcomes in intelligent tutoring systems using affect signals, and d) the personalization of machine learning models, which can adapt to subject and group-specific nuances in facial and gestural behavior. Specifically, we first conduct a quantitative comparison of two approaches to the problem of segmenting and classifying gestures on two benchmark gesture datasets: a method that simultaneously segments and classifies gestures versus a cascaded method that performs the tasks sequentially. Second, we introduce a framework that computationally predicts an accurate score for facial expressivity and validate it on a dataset of interview videos of people with Parkinson's disease. Third, based on a unique dataset of videos of students interacting with MathSpring, an intelligent tutoring system, collected by our collaborative research team, we build models to predict learning outcomes from their facial affect signals. Finally, we propose a novel solution to a relatively unexplored area in automatic face and gesture analysis research: personalization of models to individuals and groups. We develop hierarchical Bayesian neural networks to overcome the challenges posed by group or subject-specific variations in face and gesture signals. We successfully validate our formulation on the problems of personalized subject-specific gesture classification, context-specific facial expressivity recognition and student-specific learning outcome prediction. We demonstrate the flexibility of our hierarchical framework by validating the utility of both fully connected and recurrent neural architectures

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

Learning from Very Few Samples: A Survey

Few sample learning (FSL) is significant and challenging in the field of machine learning. The capability of learning and generalizing from very few samples successfully is a noticeable demarcation separating artificial intelligence and human intelligence since humans can readily establish their cognition to novelty from just a single or a handful of examples whereas machine learning algorithms typically entail hundreds or thousands of supervised samples to guarantee generalization ability. Despite the long history dated back to the early 2000s and the widespread attention in recent years with booming deep learning technologies, little surveys or reviews for FSL are available until now. In this context, we extensively review 300+ papers of FSL spanning from the 2000s to 2019 and provide a timely and comprehensive survey for FSL. In this survey, we review the evolution history as well as the current progress on FSL, categorize FSL approaches into the generative model based and discriminative model based kinds in principle, and emphasize particularly on the meta learning based FSL approaches. We also summarize several recently emerging extensional topics of FSL and review the latest advances on these topics. Furthermore, we highlight the important FSL applications covering many research hotspots in computer vision, natural language processing, audio and speech, reinforcement learning and robotic, data analysis, etc. Finally, we conclude the survey with a discussion on promising trends in the hope of providing guidance and insights to follow-up researches.Comment: 30 page

Articulated human tracking and behavioural analysis in video sequences

Recently, there has been a dramatic growth of interest in the observation and tracking of human subjects through video sequences. Arguably, the principal impetus has come from the perceived demand for technological surveillance, however applications in entertainment, intelligent domiciles and medicine are also increasing. This thesis examines human articulated tracking and the classi cation of human movement, rst separately and then as a sequential process. First, this thesis considers the development and training of a 3D model of human body structure and dynamics. To process video sequences, an observation model is also designed with a multi-component likelihood based on edge, silhouette and colour. This is de ned on the articulated limbs, and visible from a single or multiple cameras, each of which may be calibrated from that sequence. Second, for behavioural analysis, we develop a methodology in which actions and activities are described by semantic labels generated from a Movement Cluster Model (MCM). Third, a Hierarchical Partitioned Particle Filter (HPPF) was developed for human tracking that allows multi-level parameter search consistent with the body structure. This tracker relies on the articulated motion prediction provided by the MCM at pose or limb level. Fourth, tracking and movement analysis are integrated to generate a probabilistic activity description with action labels. The implemented algorithms for tracking and behavioural analysis are tested extensively and independently against ground truth on human tracking and surveillance datasets. Dynamic models are shown to predict and generate synthetic motion, while MCM recovers both periodic and non-periodic activities, de ned either on the whole body or at the limb level. Tracking results are comparable with the state of the art, however the integrated behaviour analysis adds to the value of the approach.Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORSAS