David Whitney

Zhihang Ren, Jefferson Ortega, Yifan Wang et al. · berkeley

Human affect recognition has been a significant topic in psychophysics and computer vision. However, the currently published datasets have many limitations. For example, most datasets contain frames that contain only information about facial expressions. Due to the limitations of previous datasets, it is very hard to either understand the mechanisms for affect recognition of humans or generalize well on common cases for computer vision models trained on those datasets. In this work, we introduce a brand new large dataset, the Video-based Emotion and Affect Tracking in Context Dataset (VEATIC), that can conquer the limitations of the previous datasets. VEATIC has 124 video clips from Hollywood movies, documentaries, and home videos with continuous valence and arousal ratings of each frame via real-time annotation. Along with the dataset, we propose a new computer vision task to infer the affect of the selected character via both context and character information in each video frame. Additionally, we propose a simple model to benchmark this new computer vision task. We also compare the performance of the pretrained model using our dataset with other similar datasets. Experiments show the competing results of our pretrained model via VEATIC, indicating the generalizability of VEATIC. Our dataset is available at https://veatic.github.io.

Ye Xia, Jinkyu Kim, John Canny et al.

Inspired by human vision, we propose a new periphery-fovea multi-resolution driving model that predicts vehicle speed from dash camera videos. The peripheral vision module of the model processes the full video frames in low resolution. Its foveal vision module selects sub-regions and uses high-resolution input from those regions to improve its driving performance. We train the fovea selection module with supervision from driver gaze. We show that adding high-resolution input from predicted human driver gaze locations significantly improves the driving accuracy of the model. Our periphery-fovea multi-resolution model outperforms a uni-resolution periphery-only model that has the same amount of floating-point operations. More importantly, we demonstrate that our driving model achieves a significantly higher performance gain in pedestrian-involved critical situations than in other non-critical situations.

Ye Xia, Danqing Zhang, Jinkyu Kim et al.

Robust driver attention prediction for critical situations is a challenging computer vision problem, yet essential for autonomous driving. Because critical driving moments are so rare, collecting enough data for these situations is difficult with the conventional in-car data collection protocol---tracking eye movements during driving. Here, we first propose a new in-lab driver attention collection protocol and introduce a new driver attention dataset, Berkeley DeepDrive Attention (BDD-A) dataset, which is built upon braking event videos selected from a large-scale, crowd-sourced driving video dataset. We further propose Human Weighted Sampling (HWS) method, which uses human gaze behavior to identify crucial frames of a driving dataset and weights them heavily during model training. With our dataset and HWS, we built a driver attention prediction model that outperforms the state-of-the-art and demonstrates sophisticated behaviors, like attending to crossing pedestrians but not giving false alarms to pedestrians safely walking on the sidewalk. Its prediction results are nearly indistinguishable from ground-truth to humans. Although only being trained with our in-lab attention data, the model also predicts in-car driver attention data of routine driving with state-of-the-art accuracy. This result not only demonstrates the performance of our model but also proves the validity and usefulness of our dataset and data collection protocol.

Eric Rosen, David Whitney, Elizabeth Phillips et al.

Efficient motion intent communication is necessary for safe and collaborative work environments with collocated humans and robots. Humans efficiently communicate their motion intent to other humans through gestures, gaze, and social cues. However, robots often have difficulty efficiently communicating their motion intent to humans via these methods. Many existing methods for robot motion intent communication rely on 2D displays, which require the human to continually pause their work and check a visualization. We propose a mixed reality head-mounted display visualization of the proposed robot motion over the wearer's real-world view of the robot and its environment. To evaluate the effectiveness of this system against a 2D display visualization and against no visualization, we asked 32 participants to labeled different robot arm motions as either colliding or non-colliding with blocks on a table. We found a 16% increase in accuracy with a 62% decrease in the time it took to complete the task compared to the next best system. This demonstrates that a mixed-reality HMD allows a human to more quickly and accurately tell where the robot is going to move than the compared baselines.