In the past decade many robots were deployed in the wild, and people detection and tracking is an important component of such deployments. On top of that, one often needs to run modules which analyze persons and extract higher level attributes such as age and gender, or dynamic information like gaze and pose. The latter ones are especially necessary for building a reactive, social robot-person interaction. In this paper, we combine those components in a fully modular detection-tracking-analysis pipeline, called DetTA. We investigate the benefits of such an integration on the example of head and skeleton pose, by using the consistent track ID for a temporal filtering of the analysis modules' observations, showing a slight improvement in a challenging real-world scenario. We also study the potential of a so-called “free-flight” mode, where the analysis of a person attribute only relies on the filter's predictions for certain frames. Here, our study shows that this boosts the runtime dramatically, while the prediction quality remains stable. This insight is especially important for reducing power consumption and sharing precious (GPU-)memory when running many analysis components on a mobile platform, especially so in the era of expensive deep learning methods.
To the best of our knowledge, there are not many works which take a full system-level look at how temporal integration can help analysis modules inside a detection-tracking pipeline in a real-world robotic scenario. Song @cite_31 looks at the specific problem of gesture recognition, which is significantly improved by Gaussian temporal smoothing,'' but test this in a very controlled environment with only a single person in the center. Furthermore, Wall @cite_16 takes temporal integration into account for nod detection in a face-to-face robot-person interaction.
@cite_31 @cite_16
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Temporal object detection has attracted significant attention, but most popular detection methods can not leverage the rich temporal information in video or robotic vision. Although many different algorithms have been developed for video detection task, real-time online approaches are frequently deficient. In this paper, based on attention mechanism and convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM), we propose a temporal single-shot detector (TSSD) for robotic vision. Distinct from previous methods, we take aim at temporally integrating pyramidal feature hierarchy using ConvLSTM, and design a novel structure including a high-level temporal unit as well as a low-level one (HL-TU) for multi-scale feature maps. Moreover, we develop a creative temporal analysis unit, namely, attention-aware ConvLSTM (AC-LSTM), in which a temporal attention module is specially tailored for background suppression and scale suppression while ConvLSTM temporally integrates attention-aware features. An association loss is designed for temporal coherence. Finally, our method is evaluated on ImageNet VID dataset. Extensive comparisons on the detection capability confirm or validate the superiority of the proposed approach. Consequently, the developed TSSD is fairly faster and achieves an overall competitive performance in terms of mean average precision. As a temporal, real-time, and online detector, TSSD is applicable to robot's intelligent perception. We present a new approach to multi-signal gesture recognition that attends to simultaneous body and hand movements. The system examines temporal sequences of dual-channel input signals obtained via statistical inference that indicate 3D body pose and hand pose. Learning gesture patterns from these signals can be quite challenging due to the existence of long-range temporal-dependencies and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We incorporate a Gaussian temporal-smoothing kernel into the inference framework, capturing long-range temporal-dependencies and increasing the SNR efficiently. An extensive set of experiments was performed, allowing us to (1) show that combining body and hand signals significantly improves the recognition accuracy; (2) report on which features of body and hands are most informative; and (3) show that using a Gaussian temporal-smoothing significantly improves gesture recognition accuracy. In this work we report on the progress of building a system that enables fully automated fast and robust facial expression recognition from face video. We analyse subtle changes in facial expression by recognizing facial muscle action units (AUs) and analysing their temporal behavior. By detecting AUs from face video we enable the analysis of various facial communicative signals including facial expressions of emotion, attitude and mood. For an input video picturing a facial expression we detect per frame whether any of 15 different AUs is activated, whether that facial action is in the onset, apex, or offset phase, and what the total duration of the activation in question is. We base this process upon a set of spatio-temporal features calculated from tracking data for 20 facial fiducial points. To detect these 20 points of interest in the first frame of an input face video, we utilize a fully automatic, facial point localization method that uses individual feature GentleBoost templates built from Gabor wavelet features. Then, we exploit a particle filtering scheme that uses factorized likelihoods and a novel observation model that combines a rigid and a morphological model to track the facial points. The AUs displayed in the input video and their temporal segments are recognized finally by Support Vector Machines trained on a subset of most informative spatio-temporal features selected by AdaBoost. For Cohn-Kanade andMMI databases, the proposed system classifies 15 AUs occurring alone or in combination with other AUs with a mean agreement rate of 90.2 with human FACS coders. We propose a new action and gesture recognition method based on spatio-temporal covariance descriptors and a weighted Riemannian locality preserving projection approach that takes into account the curved space formed by the descriptors. The weighted projection is then exploited during boosting to create a final multiclass classification algorithm that employs the most useful spatio-temporal regions. We also show how the descriptors can be computed quickly through the use of integral video representations. Experiments on the UCF sport, CK+ facial expression and Cambridge hand gesture datasets indicate superior performance of the proposed method compared to several recent state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed method is robust and does not require additional processing of the videos, such as foreground detection, interest-point detection or tracking.