3D Model-Based Gaze Estimation in Natural Reading: a Systematic Error Correction Procedure based on Annotated Texts

Studying natural reading and its underlying attention processes requires devices that are able to provide precise measurements of gaze without rendering the reading activity unnatural. In this paper we propose an eye tracking system that can be used to conduct analyses of reading behavior in low constrained experimental settings. The system is designed for dual-camera-based head-mounted eye trackers and allows free head movements and note taking. The system is composed of three different modules. First, a 3D model-based gaze estimation method computes the reader’s gaze trajectory. Second, a document image retrieval algorithm is used to recognize document pages and extract annotations. Third, a systematic error correction procedure is used to post-calibrate the system parameters and compensate for spatial drifts. The validation results show that the proposed method is capable of extracting reliable gaze data when reading in low constrained experimental conditions.

Text Detection and Recognition in Images and Videos

Hervé Bourlard, Datong Chen, Jean-Marc Odobez

Text embedded in images and videos represents a rich source of information for content-based indexing and retrieval applications. In this paper, we present a new method for localizing and recognizing text in complex images and videos. Text localization is performed in a two step approach that combines the speed of a focusing step with the strength of a machine learning based text verification step. The experiments conducted show that the support vector machine is more appropriate for the verification task than the more commonly used neural networks. To perform text recognition on the localized regions, we propose a new multi-hypotheses method. Assuming different models of the text image, several segmentation hypotheses are produced. They are processed by an optical character recognition (OCR) system, and the result is selected from the generated strings according to a confidence value computed using language modeling and OCR statistics. Experiments show that this approach leads to much better results than the conventional method that tries to improve the individual segmentation algorithm. The whole system has been tested on several hours of videos and showed good performance when integrated in a sports video annotation system and a video indexing system within the framework of two European projects.

IDIAP2002

Text Detection and Recognition in Images and Videos

Hervé Bourlard, Datong Chen, Jean-Marc Odobez

2004

Application of 3D range camera in virtual human-computer interfaces

Huan Du

In this work, we propose new ways to employ 3D-ranging systems in advanced human-computer interfaces and show that they can be used for precise hand-tracking systems aiming at virtual keyboard or mouse applications. We first implement a Structured Light (SL) based 3D-ranging system as the testbed for acquiring depth information. The ranging system uses an off-the-shelf projector combined with an industrial color camera, where the projector projects well-designed line patterns onto the scene and the camera captures the reflected light from the scene and the target. The depth information is recovered from the deformed line pattern and the pre-calibrated projector-camera system. With this system we can capture dense depth maps with moderate resolution and high frame rate as the simulated input to the hand-tracking system. We then explore an approach to 3D hand matching that combines a detailed 3D hand model (skeletal + polygonal model) with a Physical-based Model Fitting technique (PMF). Virtual forces are assigned between the depth measurements and the polygonal vertices of the model. The matching problem is formulated as the minimization of the distances between the measurement and the model surface with the guidance of virtual forces. This can employ 3D information simply and directly onto the parameter space, and yield good results under challenging conditions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach we show that we can track hand motions such as typing or grasping frame by frame. The major limitation of this method is that it requires a good initialization of the hand model and the computation time to achieve convergence with good fitting results is quite long. We therefore investigated more complex hand models and feature-based matching techniques. A three-level hand model (skeletal + primitive + polygonal model) is proposed for the Multi-Level Feature Matching approach (MLFM). The matching is carried out from the bottom to top levels of different hand presentations, and distinctive features for each level extracted from both the measurements and the model are matched with Scaled Conjugate Gradient method (SCG). The matching result from lower level is used as the initial state of the model parameters for higher level matching. This hierarchical structure speeds up the optimization process and enhances the precision of the matching result. We demonstrate our approach with the same hand motion as in the previous method and compare the performance of these two methods. We show that the MLFM method is faster and more robust to hand occlusions than the PMF method. Finally, we present a more powerful approach based on the Back-Constrained Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (BC-GPLVM) that import prior information of categorized hand motion such as typing. BC-GPLVM provides a low-dimensional embedding of hand motion data, with a density function that gives higher probability to gestures and motions close to normal typing motion. This model is learned from a small set of clusters of vast captured motion data. The prior model is then combined with the previous multi-level models and features to generate a uniform cost function for optimization. We show the tracking result to demonstrate that this method can be used for human-computer interfaces requiring precise 3D hand tracking.

EPFL2008

Application of 3D range camera in virtual human-computer interfaces

Huan Du

EPFL2008