Zhi Chai

Roy Shilkrot, Zhi Chai, Minh Hoai

Visual segmentation has seen tremendous advancement recently with ready solutions for a wide variety of scene types, including human hands and other body parts. However, focus on segmentation of human hands while performing complex tasks, such as manual assembly, is still severely lacking. Segmenting hands from tools, work pieces, background and other body parts is extremely difficult because of self-occlusions and intricate hand grips and poses. In this paper we introduce BusyHands, a large open dataset of pixel-level annotated images of hands performing 13 different tool-based assembly tasks, from both real-world captures and virtual-world renderings. A total of 7906 samples are included in our first-in-kind dataset, with both RGB and depth images as obtained from a Kinect V2 camera and Blender. We evaluate several state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods on our dataset as a proposed performance benchmark.

Zhi Chai, Roy Shilkrot

Touchable projection with structured light range cameras is a prolific medium for large interaction surfaces, affording multiple simultaneous users and simple, cheap setup. However robust touch detection in such projector-depth systems is difficult to achieve due to measurement noise. We propose a novel combination of surface touch detection and a deep network for hand pose estimation, which aids in detecting both on- and above-surface hand gestures, disambiguating multiple touch fingers, as well as recovering fingertip positions in face of noisy input. We present the details of our GPU-accelerated system and an evaluation of its performance, as well as applications such as an enhanced virtual keyboard that utilizes the added features.