217 research outputs found
The Future of Humanoid Robots
This book provides state of the art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the field of humanoid robotics and its applications. It is expected that humanoids will change the way we interact with machines, and will have the ability to blend perfectly into an environment already designed for humans. The book contains chapters that aim to discover the future abilities of humanoid robots by presenting a variety of integrated research in various scientific and engineering fields, such as locomotion, perception, adaptive behavior, human-robot interaction, neuroscience and machine learning. The book is designed to be accessible and practical, with an emphasis on useful information to those working in the fields of robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational methods and other fields of science directly or indirectly related to the development and usage of future humanoid robots. The editor of the book has extensive R&D experience, patents, and publications in the area of humanoid robotics, and his experience is reflected in editing the content of the book
SEGMENTATION, RECOGNITION, AND ALIGNMENT OF COLLABORATIVE GROUP MOTION
Modeling and recognition of human motion in videos has broad applications in behavioral biometrics, content-based visual data analysis, security and surveillance, as well as designing interactive environments. Significant progress has been made in the past two decades by way of new models, methods, and implementations. In this dissertation, we focus our attention on a relatively less investigated sub-area called collaborative group motion analysis. Collaborative group motions are those that typically involve multiple objects, wherein the motion patterns of individual objects may vary significantly in both space and time, but the collective motion pattern of the ensemble allows characterization in terms of geometry and statistics. Therefore, the motions or activities of an individual object constitute local information. A framework to synthesize all local information into a holistic view, and to explicitly characterize interactions among objects, involves large scale global reasoning, and is of significant complexity. In this dissertation, we first review relevant previous contributions on human motion/activity modeling and recognition, and then propose several approaches to answer a sequence of traditional vision questions including 1) which of the motion elements among all are the ones relevant to a group motion pattern of interest (Segmentation); 2) what is the underlying motion pattern (Recognition); and 3) how two motion ensembles are similar and how we can 'optimally' transform one to match the other (Alignment). Our primary practical scenario is American football play, where the corresponding problems are 1) who are offensive players; 2) what are the offensive strategy they are using; and 3) whether two plays are using the same strategy and how we can remove the spatio-temporal misalignment between them due to internal or external factors. The proposed approaches discard traditional modeling paradigm but explore either concise descriptors, hierarchies, stochastic mechanism, or compact generative model to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency.
In particular, the intrinsic geometry of the spaces of the involved features/descriptors/quantities is exploited and statistical tools are established on these nonlinear manifolds. These initial attempts have identified new challenging problems in complex motion analysis, as well as in more general tasks in video dynamics. The insights gained from nonlinear geometric modeling and analysis in this dissertation may hopefully be useful toward a broader class of computer vision applications
Vision-based techniques for gait recognition
Global security concerns have raised a proliferation of video surveillance
devices. Intelligent surveillance systems seek to discover possible threats
automatically and raise alerts. Being able to identify the surveyed object can
help determine its threat level. The current generation of devices provide
digital video data to be analysed for time varying features to assist in the
identification process. Commonly, people queue up to access a facility and
approach a video camera in full frontal view. In this environment, a variety of
biometrics are available - for example, gait which includes temporal features
like stride period. Gait can be measured unobtrusively at a distance. The video
data will also include face features, which are short-range biometrics. In this
way, one can combine biometrics naturally using one set of data. In this paper
we survey current techniques of gait recognition and modelling with the
environment in which the research was conducted. We also discuss in detail the
issues arising from deriving gait data, such as perspective and occlusion
effects, together with the associated computer vision challenges of reliable
tracking of human movement. Then, after highlighting these issues and
challenges related to gait processing, we proceed to discuss the frameworks
combining gait with other biometrics. We then provide motivations for a novel
paradigm in biometrics-based human recognition, i.e. the use of the
fronto-normal view of gait as a far-range biometrics combined with biometrics
operating at a near distance
Event-based Vision: A Survey
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame
cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously
measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode
the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer
attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution
(in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low
power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in
reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics
and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as
low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are
required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to
unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the
emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the
algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We
present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are
available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision
(feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision
(reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques
developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as
specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural
networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled
and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient,
bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world
Simultaneously Tracking and Recognition of Facial Features and Facial Expressions
The tracking and recognition of facial activities from images have attracted a great attention in computer vision field. Face activities are divided in the three different levels. First, the bottom level, facial feature points around every facial sections, i.e., eyebrow, mouth, etc., capture the face information point by point. Second, in the middle level, facial activity units, defined in the facial activity coding framework, illustrate the construction of a specific set of facial muscles, i.e., lid tightener, eyebrow raiser, and so forth. At last, in the top level, six types of facial expressions are illustrate the facial muscle movement and are usually used to display the human feeling states. Rather than the standard approaches, which in general just concentrate on a two levels of face activities, and tracking them independently, this paper presents a Advanced machine learning techniques are used to learn the model in view of both training information and subjective prior knowledge. Given the model and the estimates the facial movements, and each of the three individual levels of face activities are recognized at the same time through an expression engine. Experiments are performed to illustrate effectiveness of the above proposed model
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