A dynamic model for real-time tracking of hands in bimanual movements

The problem of hand tracking in the presence of occlusion is addressed. In bimanual movements the hands tend to be synchronised effortlessly. Different aspects of this synchronisation are the basis of our research to track the hands. The spatial synchronisation in bimanual movements is modelled by the position and the temporal synchronisation by the velocity and acceleration of each hand. Based on a dynamic model, we introduce algorithms for occlusion detection and hand tracking

Bayesian fusion of hidden Markov models for understanding bimanual movements

Understanding hand and body gestures is a part of a wide spectrum of current research in computer vision and human-computer interaction. A part of this can be the recognition of movements in which the two hands move simultaneously to do something or imply a meaning. We present a Bayesian network for fusing hidden Markov models in order to recognise a bimanual movement. A bimanual movement is tracked and segmented by a tracking algorithm. Hidden Markov models are assigned to the segments in order to learn and recognize the partial movement within each segment. A Bayesian network fuses the HMMs in order to perceive the movement of the two hands as a single entity

Detecting execution failures using learned action models

Planners reason with abstracted models of the behaviours they use to construct plans. When plans are turned into the instructions that drive an executive, the real behaviours interacting with the unpredictable uncertainties of the environment can lead to failure. One of the challenges for intelligent autonomy is to recognise when the actual execution of a behaviour has diverged so far from the expected behaviour that it can be considered to be a failure. In this paper we present an approach by which a trace of the execution of a behaviour is monitored by tracking its most likely explanation through a learned model of how the behaviour is normally executed. In this way, possible failures are identified as deviations from common patterns of the execution of the behaviour. We perform an experiment in which we inject errors into the behaviour of a robot performing a particular task, and explore how well a learned model of the task can detect where these errors occur

Hierarchical recognition of intentional human gestures for sports video annotation

We present a novel technique for the recognition of complex human gestures for video annotation using accelerometers and the hidden Markov model. Our extension to the standard hidden Markov model allows us to consider gestures at different levels of abstraction through a hierarchy of hidden states. Accelerometers in the form of wrist bands are attached to humans performing intentional gestures, such as umpires in sports. Video annotation is then performed by populating the video with time stamps indicating significant events, where a particular gesture occurs. The novelty of the technique lies in the development of a probabilistic hierarchical framework for complex gesture recognition and the use of accelerometers to extract gestures and significant events for video annotation

Parameterized Neural Network Language Models for Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) models need to deal with two difficult issues, vocabulary mismatch and term dependencies. Vocabulary mismatch corresponds to the difficulty of retrieving relevant documents that do not contain exact query terms but semantically related terms. Term dependencies refers to the need of considering the relationship between the words of the query when estimating the relevance of a document. A multitude of solutions has been proposed to solve each of these two problems, but no principled model solve both. In parallel, in the last few years, language models based on neural networks have been used to cope with complex natural language processing tasks like emotion and paraphrase detection. Although they present good abilities to cope with both term dependencies and vocabulary mismatch problems, thanks to the distributed representation of words they are based upon, such models could not be used readily in IR, where the estimation of one language model per document (or query) is required. This is both computationally unfeasible and prone to over-fitting. Based on a recent work that proposed to learn a generic language model that can be modified through a set of document-specific parameters, we explore use of new neural network models that are adapted to ad-hoc IR tasks. Within the language model IR framework, we propose and study the use of a generic language model as well as a document-specific language model. Both can be used as a smoothing component, but the latter is more adapted to the document at hand and has the potential of being used as a full document language model. We experiment with such models and analyze their results on TREC-1 to 8 datasets

Accurate recognition of large number of hand gestures

A hierarchical gesture recognition algorithm is introduced to recognise a large number of gestures. Three stages of the proposed algorithm are based on a new hand tracking technique to recognise the actual beginning of a gesture using a Kalman filtering process, hidden Markov models and graph matching. Processing time is important in working with large databases. Therefore, special cares are taken to deal with the large number of gestures, which are partially similar

Hidden Markov Models for Pipeline Damage Detection Using Piezoelectric Transducers

Oil and gas pipeline leakages lead to not only enormous economic loss but also environmental disasters. How to detect the pipeline damages including leakages and cracks has attracted much research attention. One of the promising leakage detection method is to use lead zirconate titanate (PZT) transducers to detect the negative pressure wave when leakage occurs. PZT transducers can generate and detect guided stress waves for crack detection also. However, the negative pressure waves or guided stress waves may not be easily detected with environmental interference, e.g., the oil and gas pipelines in offshore environment. In this paper, a Gaussian mixture model based hidden Markov model (GMM-HMM) method is proposed to detect the pipeline leakage and crack depth in changing environment and time-varying operational conditions. Leakages in different sections or crack depths are considered as different states in hidden Markov models (HMM). Laboratory experiments show that the GMM-HMM method can recognize the crack depth and leakage of pipeline such as whether there is a leakage, where the leakage is

Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Morphable Models for Representation of complex movements for Imitation Learning

Imitation learning is a promising technique for teaching robots complex movement sequences. One key problem in this area is the transfer of perceived movement characteristics from perception to action. For the solution of this problem, representations are required that are suitable for the analysis and the synthesis of complex action sequences. We describe the method of Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Morphable Models that allows an automatic segmentation of movements sequences into movement primitives, and a modeling of these primitives by morphing between a set of prototypical trajectories. We use HSTMMs in an imitation learning task for human writing movements. The models are learned from recorded trajectories and transferred to a human-like robot arm. Due to the generalization proper- ties of our movement representation, the arm is capable of synthesizing new writing movements with only a few learning examples