This paper presents the research and development of the prototype of the assistive mobile information robot (AMIR). The main features of the presented prototype are voice and gesture-based interfaces with Russian speech and sign language recognition and synthesis techniques and a high degree of robot autonomy. AMIR prototype’s aim is to be used as a robotic cart for shopping in grocery stores and/or supermarkets. Among the main topics covered in this paper are the presentation of the interface (three modalities), the single-handed gesture recognition system (based on a collected database of Russian sign language elements), as well as the technical description of the robotic platform (architecture, navigation algorithm). The use of multimodal interfaces, namely the speech and gesture modalities, make human-robot interaction natural and intuitive, as well as sign language recognition allows hearing-impaired people to use this robotic cart. AMIR prototype has promising perspectives for real usage in supermarkets, both due to its assistive capabilities and its multimodal user interface.

Decellularized tissue is an important source for biological tissue engineering. Evaluation of the quality of decellularized tissue is performed using scanned images of hematoxylin-eosin stained (H&E) tissue sections and is usually dependent on the observer. The first step in creating a tool for the assessment of the quality of the liver scaffold without observer bias is the automatic segmentation of the whole slide image into three classes: the background, intralobular area, and extralobular area. Such segmentation enables to perform the texture analysis in the intralobular area of the liver scaffold, which is crucial part in the recellularization procedure. Existing semi-automatic methods for general segmentation (i.e., thresholding, watershed, etc.) do not meet the quality requirements. Moreover, there are no methods available to solve this task automatically. Given the low amount of training data, we proposed a two-stage method. The first stage is based on classification of simple hand-crafted descriptors of the pixels and their neighborhoods. This method is trained on partially annotated data. Its outputs are used for training of the second-stage approach, which is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). Our architecture inspired by U-Net reaches very promising results, despite a very low amount of the training data. We provide qualitative and quantitative data for both stages. With the best training setup, we reach 90.70% recognition accuracy.

In this paper we focus on appearance features particularly the Local Binary Patterns describing the manual component of Sign Language. We compare the performance of these features with geometric moments describing the trajectory and shape of hands. Since the non-manual component is also very important for sign recognition we localize facial landmarks via Active Shape Model combined with Landmark detector that increases the robustness of model fitting. We test the recognition performance of individual features and their combinations on a database consisting of 11 signers and 23 signs with several repetitions. Local Binary Patterns outperform the geometric moments. When the features are combined we achieve a recognition rate up to 99.75% for signer dependent tests and 57.54% for signer independent tests.