Ho-yin Chan

Jiao Suo, Yifan Liu, Clio Cheng et al.

Human limb motion tracking and recognition plays an important role in medical rehabilitation training, lower limb assistance, prosthetics design for amputees, feedback control for assistive robots, etc. Lightweight wearable sensors, including inertial sensors, surface electromyography sensors, and flexible strain/pressure, are promising to become the next-generation human motion capture devices. Herein, we present a wireless wearable device consisting of a sixteen-channel flexible sponge-based pressure sensor array to recognize various human lower limb motions by detecting contours on the human skin caused by calf gastrocnemius muscle actions. Each sensing element is a round porous structure of thin carbon nanotube/polydimethylsiloxane nanocomposites with a diameter of 4 mm and thickness of about 400 μm. Ten human subjects were recruited to perform ten different lower limb motions while wearing the developed device. The motion classification result with the support vector machine method shows a macro-recall of about 97.3% for all ten motions tested. This work demonstrates a portable wearable muscle activity detection device with a lower limb motion recognition application, which can be potentially used in assistive robot control, healthcare, sports monitoring, etc.

Kwok-Leung Chan, Liping Li, Arthur Wing-Tak Leung et al.

In current practice, scene survey is carried out by workers using total stations. The method has high accuracy, but it incurs high costs if continuous monitoring is needed. Techniques based on photogrammetry, with the relatively cheaper digital cameras, have gained wide applications in many fields. Besides point measurement, photogrammetry can also create a three-dimensional (3D) model of the scene. Accurate 3D model reconstruction depends on high quality images. Degraded images will result in large errors in the reconstructed 3D model. In this paper, we propose a method that can be used to improve the visibility of the images, and eventually reduce the errors of the 3D scene model. The idea is inspired by image dehazing. Each original image is first transformed into multiple exposure images by means of gamma-correction operations and adaptive histogram equalization. The transformed images are analyzed by the computation of the local binary patterns. The image is then enhanced, with each pixel generated from the set of transformed image pixels weighted by a function of the local pattern feature and image saturation. Performance evaluation has been performed on benchmark image dehazing datasets. Experimentations have been carried out on outdoor and indoor surveys. Our analysis finds that the method works on different types of degradation that exist in both outdoor and indoor images. When fed into the photogrammetry software, the enhanced images can reconstruct 3D scene models with sub-millimeter mean errors.