Jeroen, auteur op A Nice Gesture by Jeroen Arendsen

A Computer Vision based hand gesture recognition system that replaces the mouse with simple hand movements. It’s done at the School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland.

Sometimes the future of gesture recognition can become clearer by examining an application that will definitely NOT hit the market running. Why on earth would anyone prefer to wave their hands in the air and click on empty space with their index finger instead of feeling a solid mouse underneath your hands? I just don’t get it. If it’s supposed to be a technology showcase, then okay, they managed to get something up and running, bravo!

I think that generally speaking, people are enthusiastic about human-computer interaction if it feels good , because it’s usable (effective, efficient, economic), pleasing to the senses, or in some other way beneficial to their concerns. I imagine that this virtual ‘mousing’ is none of the above. Maybe if they changed it to a pistol gesture, where you shoot with your thumb, it would get slightly better. But I would have to be able to launch a quick barrage of shots, say 4 or 5 per second, for this to be of any use in a first person shooter game. There’s a nice challenge for you, guys 🙂

R2D2 Interactive Astromech Droid

By Jeroen

On January 9, 2009

In Robots, YouTube Faves

Brand new and polished right out of the oil bath, R2 responds to your voice commands, and even has a cupholder! What more would you want from an astromech?

Here is another good R2D2, this time a lot cheaper than the Nikko one, at about $100. I like the voice recognition which seems to be working well.

Protected: R2-D2 DVD Projector By Nikko

By Jeroen

On January 9, 2009

In YouTube Faves

Static Irish Sign Language Recognition System

By Jeroen

On January 8, 2009

In YouTube Faves

This is a demo of hand segmentation, tracking and recognition to perform irish SL alphabets. It was done in School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland. produced by Tommy Coogan, George Awad, Jeff Han, & supervised by Dr. Alistair Sutherland

This is hardly sign language and it hardly qualifies as a gesture recognition system, but I still wanted to note this video down for future reference. I do see Jeff Han as one of co-producers and he previously made really nice ‘multi-touch gestures’ (here). Alistair Sutherland (here) is doing more interesting projects on gesture recognition as well, see below:

This kind of hand and face tracking is something that Jeroen Lichtenauer (here) spent a lot of time working on in our Elo project.

Dutch Robot Wars Series 2 Heat C

By Jeroen

On January 8, 2009

In YouTube Faves

Battle 1 Flepser vs Bamm Bamm

There have been previous ‘Robot Wars’ in the Netherlands, but they are not shooting this anymore as far as I know. I think it is all a bit sad, that this is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of robot games. I would much rather prefer games that show of the skill of the programmers. Stuff that creates an effect that is magical, and makes you think ‘wow, how did they do that?’

But I must confess that I find this kind of demolition derby quite entertaining, I just can’t help myself.

It would be great to revive the idea of ‘Robot Games’ in the Netherlands. I know they were organized by TNO, my future employer, together with people from the TU Delft, my current employer. But the last one was a while ago, in 2005 (here). I also found the game rules (here).

You would have to do this together with a number of people and set up an organisation that can host these events regularly, not every once in a while. Perhaps some big gaming hall that can use the extra crowd it brings, maybe some people that are interested in robot publicity, maybe some technical university interested in exciting future students for robot topics, and then some researchers (like me) who are interested in what people find entertaining in robots.

If we organise it, they will come!

Teleoperation of a mobile robot using arm gestures

By Jeroen

On January 8, 2009

In YouTube Faves

This is an oldie…

The video shows my application to control a mobile robot at distance using arm gestures. It was recorded in 2002 at Tec de Monterrey Campus Cuernavaca, México.

The system is composed by a Nomad Scout II robot with a cheap videocamera, and a Silicon Graphics computer R5000 with a webcam. Many features of the the system running can be seen on the computer’s monitor.

There are 3 main windows, the top-left window shows the images taken with the robot’s camera.
In the window on the right it can be seen the visual tracking of the right hand of the user.
On the blue window behind the other two shows the recognition results.

For gesture recognition we use dynamic naive Bayesian classifiers, a variant of hidden Markov models that considers a factored representation of the attributes or features that compose each observation. This representation requires less iterations of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm while keep competitive classification rates.

To characterize gestures we use posture and motion features, two sets of features not commonly combined for historical reasons :S
We have proved empirically that this kind of features are useful to recognize similar gestures.

More information of this work:

Dynamic Bayesian networks for visual recognition of dynamic gestures
Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems
H. Avilés and Enrique Sucar
Volume 12, Numbers 3-4 / 2002, 243 – 250 (link)

Visual recognition of gestures using dynamic naive Bayesian classifiers
Aviles-Arriaga, H.H.; Sucar, L.E.; Mendoza, C.E.; Vargas, B.
Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2003. Proceedings. ROMAN 2003. The 12th IEEE International Workshop on
Volume , Issue , 31 Oct.-2 Nov. 2003 Page(s): 133 – 138 (link)

Visual Recognition of Similar Gestures
International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2006.
H.H. Aviles-Arriaga L.E. Sucar C.E. Mendoza (link)

Any suggestions and comments are welcome.
hector_hugo_aviles@hotmail.com

I am thinking about applying gesture (and speech) recognition to robots and here is an example of previous work. Unfortunately, the video is more or less totally uncomprehensible, so it’s not your fault if you can’t follow it… And the sound is dreadful, too. I wonder what happened to this piece of work, though.

Robot Love: Sex In The Digital Age

By Jeroen

On January 8, 2009

In YouTube Faves

Scientists from The Netherlands predict that there will be a lot of robot love in the future. In episode #20 of pop!talk, superstar Ebonia explores sex in the digital age and its implications for mankind today.

I read about this guy, David Levy, in a Dutch local newssite (here). He went to do his PhD in Maastricht (here), because the British were too uptight to allow his topic…

Robot Sex

By Jeroen

On January 8, 2009

In YouTube Faves

Horny humping robot

Not exactly what one might think of… but it gave me a good laugh 🙂

Robosapien loves mariokart!

By Jeroen

On January 8, 2009

In YouTube Faves

Since i got my ds lite robsapien is playing mariokart non-stop! he’s already very good at snaking…i guess i’ll have to get him his own lite. 🙂
Sorry ’bout the P-logo, it was too late to fix it.