Abstract: This paper presents a novel system for automatic sleep system recommendation using RGB, depth and pressure information. It consists of a validated clinical knowledge-based model that, along with a set of prescription variables extracted automatically, obtains a personalized bed design recommendation. The automatic process starts by performing multi-part human body RGB-D segmentation combining GrabCut, 3D Shape Context descriptor and Thin Plate Splines, to then extract a set of anthropometric landmark points by applying orthogonal plates to the segmented human body. The extracted variables are introduced to the computerized clinical model to calculate body circumferences, weight, morphotype and Body Mass Index categorization. Furthermore, pressure image analysis is performed to extract pressure values and at-risk points, which are also introduced to the model to eventually obtain the final prescription of mattress, topper, and pillow. We validate the complete system in a set of 200 subjects, showing accurate category classification and high correlation results with respect to manual measures.

Abstract: Procrustes Analysis (PA) has been a popular technique to align and build 2-D statistical models of shapes. Given a set of 2-D shapes PA is applied to remove rigid transformations. Then, a non-rigid 2-D model is computed by modeling (e.g., PCA) the residual. Although PA has been widely used, it has several limitations for modeling 2-D shapes: occluded landmarks and missing data can result in local minima solutions, and there is no guarantee that the 2-D shapes provide a uniform sampling of the 3-D space of rotations for the object. To address previous issues, this paper proposes Subspace PA (SPA). Given several
instances of a 3-D object, SPA computes the mean and a 2-D subspace that can simultaneously model all rigid and non-rigid deformations of the 3-D object. We propose a discrete (DSPA) and continuous (CSPA) formulation for SPA, assuming that 3-D samples of an object are provided. DSPA extends the traditional PA, and produces unbiased 2-D models by uniformly sampling different views of the 3-D object. CSPA provides a continuous approach to uniformly sample the space of 3-D rotations, being more efficient in space and time. Experiments using SPA to learn 2-D models of bodies from motion capture data illustrate the benefits of our approach.

Abstract: Edges are key components of any visual scene to the extent that we can recognise objects merely by their silhouettes. The human visual system captures edge information through neurons in the visual cortex that are sensitive to both intensity discontinuities and particular orientations. The “classical approach” assumes that these cells are only responsive to the stimulus present within their receptive fields, however, recent studies demonstrate that surrounding regions and inter-areal feedback connections influence their responses significantly. In this work we propose a biologically-inspired edge detection model in which orientation selective neurons are represented through the first derivative of a Gaussian function resembling double-opponent cells in the primary visual cortex (V1). In our model we account for four kinds of receptive field surround, i.e. full, far, iso- and orthogonal-orientation, whose contributions are contrast-dependant. The output signal from V1 is pooled in its perpendicular direction by larger V2 neurons employing a contrast-variant centre-surround kernel. We further introduce a feedback connection from higher-level visual areas to the lower ones. The results of our model on three benchmark datasets show a big improvement compared to the current non-learning and biologically-inspired state-of-the-art algorithms while being competitive to the learning-based methods.

Abstract: Deep video action recognition models have been highly successful in recent years but require large quantities of manually-annotated data, which are expensive and laborious to obtain. In this work, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for video action recognition, as synthetic data have been successfully used to supervise models for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation, physics models and other components of modern game engines. With this model we generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for “Procedural Human Action Videos”. PHAV contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1000 examples for each of 35 action categories. Our video generation approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences: 14 of these 35 categories are procedurally-defined synthetic actions. In addition, each video is represented with 6 different data modalities, including RGB, optical flow and pixel-level semantic labels. These modalities are generated almost simultaneously using the Multiple Render Targets feature of modern GPUs. In order to leverage PHAV, we introduce a deep multi-task (i.e. that considers action classes from multiple datasets) representation learning architecture that is able to simultaneously learn from synthetic and real video datasets, even when their action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance. Our approach also significantly outperforms video representations produced by fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.

Abstract: First impressions strongly influence social interactions, having a high impact in the personal and professional life. In this paper, we present a deep Classification-Regression Network (CR-Net) for analyzing the Big Five personality problem and further assisting on job interview recommendation in a first impressions setup. The setup is based on the ChaLearn First Impressions dataset, including multimodal data with video, audio, and text converted from the corresponding audio data, where each person is talking in front of a camera. In order to give a comprehensive prediction, we analyze the videos from both the entire scene (including the person’s motions and background) and the face of the person. Our CR-Net first performs personality trait classification and applies a regression later, which can obtain accurate predictions for both personality traits and interview recommendation. Furthermore, we present a new loss function called Bell Loss to address inaccurate predictions caused by the regression-to-the-mean problem. Extensive experiments on the First Impressions dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed network, outperforming the state-of-the-art.

Abstract: In this paper we propose the first deep unsupervised approach in human body reconstruction to estimate body surface from a sparse set of landmarks, so called DeepMurf. We apply a denoising autoencoder to estimate missing landmarks. Then we apply an attention model to estimate body joints from landmarks. Finally, a cascading network is applied to regress parameters of a statistical generative model that reconstructs body. Our set of proposed loss functions allows us to train the network in an unsupervised way. Results on four public datasets show that our approach accurately reconstructs the human body from real world mocap data.

Abstract: Bilinear models have been successfully applied to separate two factors, for example, pose variances and different identities in face recognition problems. Asymmetric model is a type of bilinear model which models a system in the most concise way. But seldom there are works exploring the applications of asymmetric bilinear model on face recognition problem with illumination changes. In this work, we propose enhanced asymmetric model for illumination-robust face recognition. Instead of initializing the factor probabilities randomly, we initialize them with nearest neighbor method and optimize them for the test data. Above that, we update the factor model to be identified. We validate the proposed method on a designed data sample and extended Yale B dataset. The experiment results show that the enhanced asymmetric models give promising results and good recognition accuracies.

Abstract: Visual impairment affects the normal course of activities in everyday life including mobility, education, employment, and social interaction. Most of the existing technical solutions devoted to empowering the visually impaired people are in the areas of navigation (obstacle avoidance), access to printed information and object recognition. Less effort has been dedicated so far in developing solutions to support social interactions. In this paper, we introduce a Social-Aware Assistant (SAA) that provides visually impaired people with cues to enhance their face-to-face conversations. The system consists of a perceptive component (represented by smartglasses with an embedded video camera) and a feedback component (represented by a haptic belt). When the vision system detects a head nodding, the belt vibrates, thus suggesting the user to replicate (mirror) the gesture. In our experiments, sighted persons interacted with blind people wearing the SAA. We instructed the former to mirror the noddings according to the vibratory signal, while the latter interacted naturally. After the face-to-face conversation, the participants had an interview to express their experience regarding the use of this new technological assistant. With the data collected during the experiment, we have assessed quantitatively and qualitatively the device usefulness and user satisfaction.