The recent spread of low-cost and high-quality RGB-D and infrared sensors has supported the development of Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) in which the interaction is carried without the use of physical devices such as keyboards and mouse. In this paper, we propose a NUI based on dynamic hand gestures, acquired with RGB, depth and infrared sensors. The system is developed for the challenging automotive context, aiming at reducing the driver’s distraction during the driving activity. Specifically, the proposed framework is based on a multimodal combination of Convolutional Neural Networks whose input is represented by depth and infrared images, achieving a good level of light invariance, a key element in vision-based in-car systems. We test our system on a recent multimodal dataset collected in a realistic automotive setting, placing the sensors in an innovative point of view, i.e., in the tunnel console looking upwards. The dataset consists of a great amount of labelled frames containing 12 dynamic gestures performed by multiple subjects, making it suitable for deep learning-based approaches. In addition, we test the system on a different well-known public dataset, created for the interaction between the driver and the car. Experimental results on both datasets reveal the efficacy and the real-time performance of the proposed method.

Natural User Interfaces can be an effective way to reduce driver’s inattention during the driving activity. To this end, in this paper we propose a new dataset, called Briareo, specifically collected for the hand gesture recognition task in the automotive context. The dataset is acquired from an innovative point of view, exploiting different kinds of cameras, i.e. RGB, infrared stereo, and depth, that provide various types of images and 3D hand joints. Moreover, the dataset contains a significant amount of hand gesture samples, performed by several subjects, allowing the use of deep learning-based approaches. Finally, a framework for hand gesture segmentation and classification is presented, exploiting a method introduced to assess the quality of the proposed dataset.

Current movie captioning architectures are not capable of mentioning characters with their proper name, replacing them with a generic “someone” tag. The lack of movie description datasets with characters’ visual annotations surely plays a relevant role in this shortage. Recently, we proposed to extend the M-VAD dataset by introducing such information. In this paper, we present an improved version of the dataset, namely M-VAD Names, and its semi-automatic annotation procedure. The resulting dataset contains 63 k visual tracks and 34 k textual mentions, all associated with character identities. To showcase the features of the dataset and quantify the complexity of the naming task, we investigate multimodal architectures to replace the “someone” tags with proper character names in existing video captions. The evaluation is further extended by testing this application on videos outside of the M-VAD Names dataset.

Nowadays, we are witnessing the wide diffusion of active depth sensors. However, the generalization capabilities and performance of the deep face recognition approaches that are based on depth data are hindered by the different sensor technologies and the currently available depth-based datasets, which are limited in size and acquired through the same device. In this paper, we present an analysis on the use of depth maps, as obtained by active depth sensors and deep neural architectures for the face recognition task. We compare different depth data representations (depth and normal images, voxels, point clouds), deep models (two-dimensional and three-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks, PointNet-based networks), and pre-processing and normalization techniques in order to determine the configuration that maximizes the recognition accuracy and is capable of generalizing better on unseen data and novel acquisition settings. Extensive intra- and cross-dataset experiments, which were performed on four public databases, suggest that representations and methods that are based on normal images and point clouds perform and generalize better than other 2D and 3D alternatives. Moreover, we propose a novel challenging dataset, namely MultiSFace, in order to specifically analyze the influence of the depth map quality and the acquisition distance on the face recognition accuracy.

Knowing the exact 3D location of workers and robots in a collaborative environment enables several real applications, such as the detection of unsafe situations or the study of mutual interactions for statistical and social purposes. In this paper, we propose a non-invasive and light-invariant framework based on depth devices and deep neural networks to estimate the 3D pose of robots from an external camera. The method can be applied to any robot without requiring hardware access to the internal states. We introduce a novel representation of the predicted pose, namely Semi-Perspective Decoupled Heatmaps (SPDH), to accurately compute 3D joint locations in world coordinates adapting efficient deep networks designed for the 2D Human Pose Estimation. The proposed approach, which takes as input a depth representation based on XYZ coordinates, can be trained on synthetic depth data and applied to real-world settings without the need for domain adaptation techniques. To this end, we present the SimBa dataset, based on both synthetic and real depth images, and use it for the experimental evaluation. Results show that the proposed approach, made of a specific depth map representation and the SPDH, overcomes the current state of the art.