Vision-based hand-gesture applications

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.10.1145/1897816.1897838There is strong evidence that future human-computer interfaces will enable more natural, intuitive communication between people and all kinds of sensor-based devices, thus more closely resembling human-human communication. Progress in the field of human-computer interaction has introduced innovative technologies that empower users to interact with computer systems in increasingly natural and intuitive ways; systems adopting them show increased efficiency, speed, power, and realism. However, users comfortable with traditional interaction methods like mice and keyboards are often unwilling to embrace new, alternative interfaces. Ideally, new interface technologies should be more accessible without requiring long periods of learning and adaptation. They should also provide more natural human-machine communication. As described in Myron Krueger’s pioneering 1991 book Artificial Reality “natural interaction” means voice and gesture. Pursuing this vision requires tools and features that mimic the principles of human communication. Employing hand-gesture communication, such interfaces have been studied and developed by many researchers over the past 30 years in multiple application areas. It is thus worthwhile to review these efforts and identify the requirements needed to win general social acceptance.National Research Council Research Associate AwardPaul Ivanier Center for Robotics Research & Production at Ben-Gurion University of the Nege

Using Deficit Functions for Crew Planning in Aviation

We use deficit functions (DFs) to decompose an aviation schedule of aircraft flights into a minimal number of periodic and balanced chains (flight sequences). Each chain visits periodically a set S of airports and is served by several cockpit crews circulating along the airports of this set. We introduce the notion of ”chunks” which are a sequence of flights serviced by a crew in one day according to contract regulations. These chunks are then used to provide crew schedules and rosters. The method provides a simplicity for the construction of aircraft schedules and crew pairings which is absent in other approaches to the problem

Human-Robot Collaborative Learning of a Bag Shaking Trajectory

Abstract—This paper presents a collaborative reinforcement learning algorithm

ABSTRACT A PROTOTYPE FUZZY SYSTEM FOR SURVEILLANCE PICTURE UNDERSTANDING

The last stage of any type of automatic surveillance system is the interpretation of the acquired information from its sensors. This work focuses on the interpretation of motion pictures taken from a surveillance camera, i.e.; image understanding. A prototype of a fuzzy expert system is presented which can describe in a natural language like manner, simple human activity in the field of view of a surveillance camera. The system is comprised of three components: a pre-processing module for image segmentation and feature extraction, an object identification fuzzy expert system (static model), and an action identification fuzzy expert system (dynamic temporal model). The system was tested on a video segment of a pedestrian passageway taken by a surveillance camera