In-Home Daily-Life Captioning Using Radio Signals

This paper aims to caption daily life --i.e., to create a textual description of people's activities and interactions with objects in their homes. Addressing this problem requires novel methods beyond traditional video captioning, as most people would have privacy concerns about deploying cameras throughout their homes. We introduce RF-Diary, a new model for captioning daily life by analyzing the privacy-preserving radio signal in the home with the home's floormap. RF-Diary can further observe and caption people's life through walls and occlusions and in dark settings. In designing RF-Diary, we exploit the ability of radio signals to capture people's 3D dynamics, and use the floormap to help the model learn people's interactions with objects. We also use a multi-modal feature alignment training scheme that leverages existing video-based captioning datasets to improve the performance of our radio-based captioning model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RF-Diary generates accurate captions under visible conditions. It also sustains its good performance in dark or occluded settings, where video-based captioning approaches fail to generate meaningful captions. For more information, please visit our project webpage: http://rf-diary.csail.mit.eduComment: ECCV 2020. The first two authors contributed equally to this pape

Recognizing human activity using RGBD data

textTraditional computer vision algorithms try to understand the world using visible light cameras. However, there are inherent limitations of this type of data source. First, visible light images are sensitive to illumination changes and background clutter. Second, the 3D structural information of the scene is lost when projecting the 3D world to 2D images. Recovering the 3D information from 2D images is a challenging problem. Range sensors have existed for over thirty years, which capture 3D characteristics of the scene. However, earlier range sensors were either too expensive, difficult to use in human environments, slow at acquiring data, or provided a poor estimation of distance. Recently, the easy access to the RGBD data at real-time frame rate is leading to a revolution in perception and inspired many new research using RGBD data. I propose algorithms to detect persons and understand the activities using RGBD data. I demonstrate the solutions to many computer vision problems may be improved with the added depth channel. The 3D structural information may give rise to algorithms with real-time and view-invariant properties in a faster and easier fashion. When both data sources are available, the features extracted from the depth channel may be combined with traditional features computed from RGB channels to generate more robust systems with enhanced recognition abilities, which may be able to deal with more challenging scenarios. As a starting point, the first problem is to find the persons of various poses in the scene, including moving or static persons. Localizing humans from RGB images is limited by the lighting conditions and background clutter. Depth image gives alternative ways to find the humans in the scene. In the past, detection of humans from range data is usually achieved by tracking, which does not work for indoor person detection. In this thesis, I propose a model based approach to detect the persons using the structural information embedded in the depth image. I propose a 2D head contour model and a 3D head surface model to look for the head-shoulder part of the person. Then, a segmentation scheme is proposed to segment the full human body from the background and extract the contour. I also give a tracking algorithm based on the detection result. I further research on recognizing human actions and activities. I propose two features for recognizing human activities. The first feature is drawn from the skeletal joint locations estimated from a depth image. It is a compact representation of the human posture called histograms of 3D joint locations (HOJ3D). This representation is view-invariant and the whole algorithm runs at real-time. This feature may benefit many applications to get a fast estimation of the posture and action of the human subject. The second feature is a spatio-temporal feature for depth video, which is called Depth Cuboid Similarity Feature (DCSF). The interest points are extracted using an algorithm that effectively suppresses the noise and finds salient human motions. DCSF is extracted centered on each interest point, which forms the description of the video contents. This descriptor can be used to recognize the activities with no dependence on skeleton information or pre-processing steps such as motion segmentation, tracking, or even image de-noising or hole-filling. It is more flexible and widely applicable to many scenarios. Finally, all the features herein developed are combined to solve a novel problem: first-person human activity recognition using RGBD data. Traditional activity recognition algorithms focus on recognizing activities from a third-person perspective. I propose to recognize activities from a first-person perspective with RGBD data. This task is very novel and extremely challenging due to the large amount of camera motion either due to self exploration or the response of the interaction. I extracted 3D optical flow features as the motion descriptor, 3D skeletal joints features as posture descriptors, spatio-temporal features as local appearance descriptors to describe the first-person videos. To address the ego-motion of the camera, I propose an attention mask to guide the recognition procedures and separate the features on the ego-motion region and independent-motion region. The 3D features are very useful at summarizing the discerning information of the activities. In addition, the combination of the 3D features with existing 2D features brings more robust recognition results and make the algorithm capable of dealing with more challenging cases.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Human-robot interaction and computer-vision-based services for autonomous robots

L'Aprenentatge per Imitació (IL), o Programació de robots per Demostració (PbD), abasta mètodes pels quals un robot aprèn noves habilitats a través de l'orientació humana i la imitació. La PbD s'inspira en la forma en què els éssers humans aprenen noves habilitats per imitació amb la finalitat de desenvolupar mètodes pels quals les noves tasques es poden transferir als robots. Aquesta tesi està motivada per la pregunta genèrica de "què imitar?", Que es refereix al problema de com extreure les característiques essencials d'una tasca. Amb aquesta finalitat, aquí adoptem la perspectiva del Reconeixement d'Accions (AR) per tal de permetre que el robot decideixi el què cal imitar o inferir en interactuar amb un ésser humà. L'enfoc proposat es basa en un mètode ben conegut que prové del processament del llenguatge natural: és a dir, la bossa de paraules (BoW). Aquest mètode s'aplica a grans bases de dades per tal d'obtenir un model entrenat. Encara que BoW és una tècnica d'aprenentatge de màquines que s'utilitza en diversos camps de la investigació, en la classificació d'accions per a l'aprenentatge en robots està lluny de ser acurada. D'altra banda, se centra en la classificació d'objectes i gestos en lloc d'accions. Per tant, en aquesta tesi es demostra que el mètode és adequat, en escenaris de classificació d'accions, per a la fusió d'informació de diferents fonts o de diferents assajos. Aquesta tesi fa tres contribucions: (1) es proposa un mètode general per fer front al reconeixement d'accions i per tant contribuir a l'aprenentatge per imitació; (2) la metodologia pot aplicar-se a grans bases de dades, que inclouen diferents modes de captura de les accions; i (3) el mètode s'aplica específicament en un projecte internacional d'innovació real anomenat Vinbot.El Aprendizaje por Imitación (IL), o Programación de robots por Demostración (PbD), abarca métodos por los cuales un robot aprende nuevas habilidades a través de la orientación humana y la imitación. La PbD se inspira en la forma en que los seres humanos aprenden nuevas habilidades por imitación con el fin de desarrollar métodos por los cuales las nuevas tareas se pueden transferir a los robots. Esta tesis está motivada por la pregunta genérica de "qué imitar?", que se refiere al problema de cómo extraer las características esenciales de una tarea. Con este fin, aquí adoptamos la perspectiva del Reconocimiento de Acciones (AR) con el fin de permitir que el robot decida lo que hay que imitar o inferir al interactuar con un ser humano. El enfoque propuesto se basa en un método bien conocido que proviene del procesamiento del lenguaje natural: es decir, la bolsa de palabras (BoW). Este método se aplica a grandes bases de datos con el fin de obtener un modelo entrenado. Aunque BoW es una técnica de aprendizaje de máquinas que se utiliza en diversos campos de la investigación, en la clasificación de acciones para el aprendizaje en robots está lejos de ser acurada. Además, se centra en la clasificación de objetos y gestos en lugar de acciones. Por lo tanto, en esta tesis se demuestra que el método es adecuado, en escenarios de clasificación de acciones, para la fusión de información de diferentes fuentes o de diferentes ensayos. Esta tesis hace tres contribuciones: (1) se propone un método general para hacer frente al reconocimiento de acciones y por lo tanto contribuir al aprendizaje por imitación; (2) la metodología puede aplicarse a grandes bases de datos, que incluyen diferentes modos de captura de las acciones; y (3) el método se aplica específicamente en un proyecto internacional de innovación real llamado Vinbot.Imitation Learning (IL), or robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD), covers methods by which a robot learns new skills through human guidance and imitation. PbD takes its inspiration from the way humans learn new skills by imitation in order to develop methods by which new tasks can be transmitted to robots. This thesis is motivated by the generic question of “what to imitate?” which concerns the problem of how to extract the essential features of a task. To this end, here we adopt Action Recognition (AR) perspective in order to allow the robot to decide what has to be imitated or inferred when interacting with a human kind. The proposed approach is based on a well-known method from natural language processing: namely, Bag of Words (BoW). This method is applied to large databases in order to obtain a trained model. Although BoW is a machine learning technique that is used in various fields of research, in action classification for robot learning it is far from accurate. Moreover, it focuses on the classification of objects and gestures rather than actions. Thus, in this thesis we show that the method is suitable in action classification scenarios for merging information from different sources or different trials. This thesis makes three contributions: (1) it proposes a general method for dealing with action recognition and thus to contribute to imitation learning; (2) the methodology can be applied to large databases which include different modes of action captures; and (3) the method is applied specifically in a real international innovation project called Vinbot