We present and characterize a simple and reliable method for detecting pointing gestures suitable for human-robot interaction applications using a commodity RGB-D camera. We exploit an existing Deep CNN model to robustly find hands and faces in RGB images, then examine the corresponding depth channel pixels to obtain full 3D pointing vectors. We test several methods of estimating the hand end-point of the pointing vector. The system runs at better than 30Hz on commodity hardware: exceeding the frame rate of typical RGB-D sensors. An estimate of the absolute pointing accuracy is found empirically by comparison with ground-truth data from a VICON motion-capture system, and the useful interaction volume established. Finally, we show an end-to-end test where a robot estimates where the pointing vector intersects the ground plane, and report the accuracy obtained. We provide source code as a ROS node, with the intention of contributing a commodity implementation of this common component in HRI systems.
There have been many studies using pointing gesture detection for human-robot interaction. In terms of capturing human body and postures, various approaches were proposed. Pointing gesture detection began with the help of wearable devices, like glove-based devices @cite_5 @cite_21 . With recent achievements in computer vision, a new era began; gesture recognition using vision-based methods are reviewed in @cite_1 and particularly hand gesture recognition @cite_2 @cite_20 . In vision-based methods, the camera plays an important role: stereo camera, multi cameras, Time-Of-Flight(TOF) camera or depth camera are different approaches for solving pointing gesture detection. @cite_4 @cite_6 proposed multi-camera approaches which are promising but less convenient for mobile-robot HRI. A TOF camera was used in @cite_17 .
@cite_4 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_20 @cite_17
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Real-time gesture recognition is mandatory for gesture based human-robot natural interaction. Several glove-based approaches are introduced for this purpose, but they are un-natural and force user to wear some cumbersome glove. This paper presents a vision-based gesture recognition method for human-robot interface. Hand poses and face are detected using multiple feature-based template matching techniques from the three largest skin-like regions that are segmented using skin color information from YIQ color space. Gesture is recognized using rule-based approach whenever the three skin-like regions at a particular image frame match with the predefined gesture. Gesture command is sent to robot through a knowledge based software platform for human-robot interface. In this paper, a method has also been proposed to detect left hand and right hand relative to face position as well as, to detect and locate its position. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated over the interaction with a pet robot named AIBO This paper presents a machine vision based ap- proach for human operators to select individual and groups of autonomous robots from a swarm of UAVs. The angular distance between the robots and the human is estimated using measures of the detected human face, which aids to determine human and multi-UAV localization and positioning. In turn, this is exploited to effectively and naturally make the human select the spatially situated robots. Spatial gestures for selecting robots are presented by the human operator using tangible input devices (i.e., colored gloves). To select individuals and groups of robot we formulate a vocabulary of two-handed spatial pointing gestures. With the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) trained in a cascaded multi-binary-class configuration, the spatial gestures are effectively learned and recognized by a swarm of UAVs. I. INTRODUCTION Without the use of teleoperated and hand-held interaction devices, human operators generally face difficulties in select- ing and commanding individual and groups of robots from a relatively large group of spatially distributed robots (i.e., a swarm). However, due to the widespread availability of cost effective digital cameras onboard UGVs and UAVs, it is increasing the attention towards developing uninstrumented methods (i.e., methods that do not use sophisticated hardware devices from the human side) for human-swarm interaction (HSI). In previous work, we focused on learning efficient features incrementally (online) from multi-viewpoint images of multiple gestures that were acquired by a swarm of ground robots (1). In this paper, we present a cascaded supervised machine learning approach to deal with the machine vision problem of selecting 3D spatially-situated robots from a networked swarm based on the recognition of spatial hand gestures. These are a natural, easy recognizable, and device- less way to enable human operators to easily interact with external artifacts such as robots. Inspired by natural human behavior, we propose an ap- proach that combines face engagement and pointing gestures to interact with a swarm of robots: standing in front of a population of robots, by looking at them and pointing at them with spatial gestures, a human operator can designate individual or groups of robots of determined size. Robots cooperate to combine their independent observations of the human's face and gestures to cooperatively determine which robots were addressed (i.e., selected). While state of the art computer vision techniques pro- vide excellent face detection, human skeleton, and gesture recognition in ideal conditions, there are often occlusions, Gesture recognition aims to recognize meaningful movements of human bodies, and is of utmost importance in intelligent human–computer robot interactions. In this paper, we present a multimodal gesture recognition method based on 3-D convolution and convolutional long-short-term-memory (LSTM) networks. The proposed method first learns short-term spatiotemporal features of gestures through the 3-D convolutional neural network, and then learns long-term spatiotemporal features by convolutional LSTM networks based on the extracted short-term spatiotemporal features. In addition, fine-tuning among multimodal data is evaluated, and we find that it can be considered as an optional skill to prevent overfitting when no pre-trained models exist. The proposed method is verified on the ChaLearn LAP large-scale isolated gesture data set (IsoGD) and the Sheffield Kinect gesture (SKIG) data set. The results show that our proposed method can obtain the state-of-the-art recognition accuracy (51.02 on the validation set of IsoGD and 98.89 on SKIG). This paper implements a real-time hand gesture recognition algorithm based on the inexpensive Kinect sensor. The use of a depth sensor allows for complex 3D gestures where the system is robust to disturbing objects or persons in the background. A Haarlet-based hand gesture recognition system is implemented to detect hand gestures in any orientation, and more in particular pointing gestures while extracting the 3D pointing direction. The system is integrated on an interactive robot (based on ROS), allowing for real-time hand gesture interaction with the robot. Pointing gestures are translated into goals for the robot, telling him where to go. A demo scenario is presented where the robot looks for persons to interact with, asks for directions, and then detects a 3D pointing direction. The robot then explores his vicinity in the given direction and looks for a new person to interact with.