Wize Mirror - a smart, multisensory cardio-metabolic risk monitoring system

In the recent years personal health monitoring systems have been gaining popularity, both as a result of the pull from the general population, keen to improve well-being and early detection of possibly serious health conditions and the push from the industry eager to translate the current significant progress in computer vision and machine learning into commercial products. One of such systems is the Wize Mirror, built as a result of the FP7 funded SEMEOTICONS (SEMEiotic Oriented Technology for Individuals CardiOmetabolic risk self-assessmeNt and Self-monitoring) project. The project aims to translate the semeiotic code of the human face into computational descriptors and measures, automatically extracted from videos, multispectral images, and 3D scans of the face. The multisensory platform, being developed as the result of that project, in the form of a smart mirror, looks for signs related to cardio-metabolic risks. The goal is to enable users to self-monitor their well-being status over time and improve their life-style via tailored user guidance. This paper is focused on the description of the part of that system, utilising computer vision and machine learning techniques to perform 3D morphological analysis of the face and recognition of psycho-somatic status both linked with cardio-metabolic risks. The paper describes the concepts, methods and the developed implementations as well as reports on the results obtained on both real and synthetic datasets

Mo(2)Cap(2): Real-time Mobile 3D Motion Capture with a Cap-mounted Fisheye Camera

We propose the first real-time system for the egocentric estimation of 3D human body pose in a wide range of unconstrained everyday activities. This setting has a unique set of challenges, such as mobility of the hardware setup, and robustness to long capture sessions with fast recovery from tracking failures. We tackle these challenges based on a novel lightweight setup that converts a standard baseball cap to a device for high-quality pose estimation based on a single cap-mounted fisheye camera. From the captured egocentric live stream, our CNN based 3D pose estimation approach runs at 60 Hz on a consumer-level GPU. In addition to the lightweight hardware setup, our other main contributions are: 1) a large ground truth training corpus of top-down fisheye images and 2) a disentangled 3D pose estimation approach that takes the unique properties of the egocentric viewpoint into account. As shown by our evaluation, we achieve lower 3D joint error as well as better 2D overlay than the existing baselines

Direct-from-Video: Unsupervised NRSfM

In this work we describe a novel approach to online dense non-rigid structure from motion. The problem is reformulated, incorporating ideas from visual object tracking, to provide a more general and unified technique, with feedback between the reconstruction and point-tracking algorithms. The resulting algorithm overcomes the limitations of many conventional techniques, such as the need for a reference image/template or precomputed trajectories. The technique can also be applied in traditionally challenging scenarios, such as modelling objects with strong self-occlusions or from an extreme range of viewpoints. The proposed algorithm needs no offline pre-learning and does not assume the modelled object stays rigid at the beginning of the video sequence. Our experiments show that in traditional scenarios, the proposed method can achieve better accuracy than the current state of the art while using less supervision. Additionally we perform reconstructions in challenging new scenarios where state-of-the-art approaches break down and where our method improves performance by up to an order of magnitude

Parametric Model-Based 3D Human Shape and Pose Estimation from Multiple Views

Human body pose and shape estimation is an important and challenging task in computer vision. This paper presents a novel method for estimating 3D human body pose and shape from several RGB images, using detected joint positions in the images and based on a parametric human body model. Firstly, the 2D joint points of the RGB images are estimated using a deep neural network, which provides a strong prior on the pose. Then, an energy function is constructed based on the 2D joint points in the RGB images and a parametric human body model. By minimizing the energy function, the pose, shape and camera parameters are obtained. The main contribution of the method over previous work, is that the optimization is based on several images simultaneously using only estimated joint positions in the images. We have performed experiments on both synthetic and real image data-sets, that demonstrate that our method can reconstruct 3D human bodies with better accuracy than previous single view methods