Towards Contextual Action Recognition and Target Localization with Active Allocation of Attention

Exploratory gaze movements are fundamental for gathering the most relevant information regarding the partner during social interactions. We have designed and implemented a system for dynamic attention allocation which is able to actively control gaze movements during a visual action recognition task. During the observation of a partners reaching movement, the robot is able to contextually estimate the goal position of the partner hand and the location in space of the candidate targets, while moving its gaze around with the purpose of optimizing the gathering of information relevant for the task. Experimental results on a simulated environment show that active gaze control provides a relevant advantage with respect to typical passive observation, both in term of estimation precision and of time required for action recognition. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

Intrinsic Textures for Relightable Free-Viewpoint Video

This paper presents an approach to estimate the intrinsic texture properties (albedo, shading, normal) of scenes from multiple view acquisition under unknown illumination conditions. We introduce the concept of intrinsic textures, which are pixel-resolution surface textures representing the intrinsic appearance parameters of a scene. Unlike previous video relighting methods, the approach does not assume regions of uniform albedo, which makes it applicable to richly textured scenes. We show that intrinsic image methods can be used to refine an initial, low-frequency shading estimate based on a global lighting reconstruction from an original texture and coarse scene geometry in order to resolve the inherent global ambiguity in shading. The method is applied to relighting of free-viewpoint rendering from multiple view video capture. This demonstrates relighting with reproduction of fine surface detail. Quantitative evaluation on synthetic models with textured appearance shows accurate estimation of intrinsic surface reflectance properties. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

There's more to magic than meets the eye

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Understanding Human Behaviors Based on Eye-head-hand Coordination

Action recognition has traditionally focused on processing fixed camera observations while ignoring non-visual information. In this paper, we explore the dynamic properties of the movements of different body parts in natural tasks: eye, head and hand movements are quite tightly coupled with the ongoing task

The 'six-eyed' stomatopod

Stomatopods (mantis shrimps) possess one of the most complex visual systems in the animal kingdom. Each eye is capable of monocular distance judgement, colour vision involving eight or more primary channels and polarisation vision. This involves a series of eye movements unique among the crustaceans. Furthermore, each eye usually acts almost entirely independently of the other. Colour, in particular, seems to be important to stomatopods. Many live in spectrally diverse tropical coral reef habitats and possess coloured markings which are used in communication between and within species

Investment strength as a function of time and temperature

10.1016/S0300-5712(98)00055-4Journal of Dentistry274297-302JDEN