A computer that reads body language
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute have
enabled a computer to understand the body poses and movements of
multiple people from video in real time—including, for the first time,
the pose of each individual's fingers.
This
new method was developed with the help of the Panoptic Studio, a
two-story dome embedded with 500 video cameras. The insights gained from
experiments in that facility now make it possible to detect the pose of
a group of people using a single camera and a laptop computer.
Yaser Sheikh, associate professor of robotics, said these methods for
tracking 2-D human form and motion open up new ways for people and
machines to interact with each other, and for people to use machines to
better understand the world around them. The ability to recognize hand
poses, for instance, will make it possible for people to interact with
computers in new and more natural ways, such as communicating with
computers simply by pointing at things.
Detecting the nuances of nonverbal communication between individuals
will allow robots to serve in social spaces, allowing robots to perceive
what people around them are doing, what moods they are in and whether
they can be interrupted. A self-driving car could get an early warning
that a pedestrian is about to step into the street by monitoring body
language. Enabling machines to understand human behavior also could
enable new approaches to behavioral diagnosis and rehabilitation for
conditions such as autism, dyslexia and depression.
"We communicate almost as much with the movement of our bodies as we
do with our voice," Sheikh said. "But computers are more or less blind
to it."
In sports analytics, real-time pose detection will make it possible
for computers not only to track the position of each player on the field
of play, as is now the case, but to also know what players are doing
with their arms, legs and heads at each point in time. The methods can
be used for live events or applied to existing videos.
To encourage more research and applications, the researchers have
released their computer code for both multiperson and hand-pose
estimation. It already is being widely used by research groups, and more
than 20 commercial groups, including automotive companies, have
expressed interest in licensing the technology, Sheikh said.
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