Thesis on Robotic Gesture Recognition / Sensory Integration available

[Jochen Triesch]

Dear connectionists,

the following thesis is available from my homepage at
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/triesch/home.html

The thesis was prepared under the supervision of Prof. C. von der Malsburg
at the Institut fuer Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany.
http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Best Regards,
  Jochen Triesch


Titel: Vision-Based Robotic Gesture Recognition

Abstract:

Vision in complex environments is a big scientific challenge for two reasons.
First, in complex environments it is not possible to segment a scene into the
constituent objects on the basis of simple cues. Second, unpredictable changes
in the environment must be tolerated. A proper domain for investigating these
problems is robotic gesture recognition, since the two problems arise there
naturally. Furthermore, gesture recognition holds the promise of making
man-machine interaction more natural and intuitive. The principal idea for
tackling the first problem is the integration of information stemming from
different cues. In the first part of this thesis, methods for tracking human
hands, finding fingertips and recognizing hand postures despite complex
backgrounds are presented, which owe their robustness to the integration of
different complementary cues. The components have been integrated into a
user-independent gesture interface implemented on an anthropomorphic robot.

The second  part is concerned with the adaptive integration of different cues,
aimed at addressing the second problem. A model of adaptive sensory integration
in the brain is proposed, which relates the psychophysical phenomena of
suppression and recalibration of discordant sensory information to a
self-organized adaptation employing fast synaptic plasticity mechanisms.
Finally, the idea of self-organized adaptation is applied to the tracking of
human faces in a scene. To this end, an adaptive tracking scheme is proposed
which combines different cues in a "democratic" manner.

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Jochen Triesch
Computer Science Department, University of Rochester
RC PO Box 270226, Rochester, NY 14627-0226, USA
phone : +1 (716) 275-2957, fax: +1 (716) 461-2018
email : triesch at cs.rochester.edu
URL   : www.cs.rochester.edu/u/triesch/
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