Head and eye egocentric gesture recognition for human-robot interaction using eyewear cameras
It addresses non-verbal communication in HRI, offering a proof-of-concept for egocentric gesture recognition, but is incremental as it builds on existing methods without robot or user studies.
This work tackles human gesture recognition for human-robot interaction by focusing on head and eye gestures from an egocentric perspective using eyewear cameras, proposing a motion-based approach with a CNN and LSTM that increases recognition rates by using internal layer outputs.
Non-verbal communication plays a particularly important role in a wide range of scenarios in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Accordingly, this work addresses the problem of human gesture recognition. In particular, we focus on head and eye gestures, and adopt an egocentric (first-person) perspective using eyewear cameras. We argue that this egocentric view may offer a number of conceptual and technical benefits over scene- or robot-centric perspectives. A motion-based recognition approach is proposed, which operates at two temporal granularities. Locally, frame-to-frame homographies are estimated with a convolutional neural network (CNN). The output of this CNN is input to a long short-term memory (LSTM) to capture longer-term temporal visual relationships, which are relevant to characterize gestures. Regarding the configuration of the network architecture, one particularly interesting finding is that using the output of an internal layer of the homography CNN increases the recognition rate with respect to using the homography matrix itself. While this work focuses on action recognition, and no robot or user study has been conducted yet, the system has been designed to meet real-time constraints. The encouraging results suggest that the proposed egocentric perspective is viable, and this proof-of-concept work provides novel and useful contributions to the exciting area of HRI.