Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Human Action Segmentation Based On A Streaming Uniform Entropy Slice Method, Cheng Peng, Sio-Long Lo, Jie Huang, Ah Chung Tsoi

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Segmentation of human actions is a major research problem in video understanding. A number of existing approaches demonstrate that performing action segmentation before action recognition results in better recognition performance. In this paper, we address the problem of action segmentation in an online manner. We first extend the clustering-based image segmentation approach into a temporal one, where hierarchical supervoxel levels for action segmentation are generated accordingly. We then propose a streaming approach to flatten the hierarchical levels into one based on Uniform Entropy Slice (UES), in order to preserve important information in the video. The flattened level contains the silhouette …

Motion Optimization And Parameter Identification For A Human And Lower Back Exoskeleton Model, Paul Manns, Manish Sreenivasa, Matthew Millard, Katja Mombaur

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Designing an exoskeleton to reduce the risk of low-back injury during lifting is challenging. Computational models of the human-robot system coupled with predictive movement simulations can help to simplify this design process. Here, we present a study that models the interaction between a human model actuated by muscles and a lower back exoskeleton. We provide a computational framework for identifying the spring parameters of the exoskeleton using an optimal control approach and forward-dynamics simulations. This is applied to generate dynamically consistent bending and lifting movements in the sagittal plane. Our computations are able to predict motions and forces of the …

Modeling And Identification Of A Realistic Spiking Neural Network And Musculoskeletal Model Of The Human Arm, And An Application To The Stretch Reflex, Manish Sreenivasa, Ko Ayusawa, Yoshihiko Nakamura

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

This study develops a multi-level neuromuscular model consisting of topological pools of spiking motor, sensory and interneurons controlling a bi-muscular model of the human arm. The spiking output of motor neuron pools were used to drive muscle actions and skeletal movement via neuromuscular junctions. Feedback information from muscle spindles were relayed via monosynaptic excitatory and disynaptic inhibitory connections, to simulate spinal afferent pathways. Subject-specific model parameters were identified from human experiments by using inverse dynamics computations and optimization methods. The identified neuromuscular model was used to simulate the biceps stretch reflex and the results were compared to an independent dataset. …

Stability Of Carbon Nanotube Yarn Biofuel Cell In Human Body Fluid, Cheong Hoon Kwon, Jae Ah Lee, Young-Bong Choi, Hyug-Han Kim, Geoffrey M. Spinks, Marcio D. Lima, Ray H. Baughman, Seon Jeong Kim

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

High performance with stability, easy-handling electrodes, and biofluid-flow controllable system with mechanical strength of the biofuel cell can be considered as the critical issues for future human body implant. These three challenges are sufficiently considered by using the effective platform regarding the high surface area from multi-walled carbon nanotube-conducting polymer with poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), and size/shape dependent flexible yarn electrodes for the implantation of biofuel cell. High power biofuel cell of mW cm-2 range in physiological condition (low glucose-containing phosphate buffered saline solution and human blood serum) controlling the stirring degree is also first demonstrated for future implantation in this study. Biofuel …

Classification Of Micro-Doppler Signatures Of Human Motions Using Log-Gabor Filters, Fok Hing Chi Tivive, Son Lam Phung, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

In recent years, Doppler radar has been used as a sensing modality for human gait recognition, due to its ability to operate in adverse weather and penetrate opaque obstacles. Doppler radar captures not only the speed of the target, but also the micro-motions of its moving parts. These micro-motions induce frequency modulations that can be used to characterise the target movements. However, a major challenge in Doppler signal processing is to extract discriminative features from the radar returns for target classification. This study presents a feature extraction method for classification of human motions from the micro-Doppler radar signal. The proposed …

Walking Paths To And From A Goal Differ: On The Role Of Bearing Angle In The Formation Of Human Locomotion Paths, Manish Sreenivasa, Katja Mombaur, Jean-Paul Laumond

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

The path that humans take while walking to a goal is the result of a cognitive process modulated by the perception of the environment and physiological constraints. The path shape and timing implicitly embeds aspects of the architecture behind this process. Here, locomotion paths were investigated during a simple task of walking to and from a goal, by looking at the evolution of the position of the human on a horizontal (x,y) plane. We found that the path while walking to a goal was not the same as that while returning from it. Forward-return paths were systematically separated by 0.5-1.9m, …

Inertial Sensing For Human Motor Control Symmetry In Injury Rehabilitation, Matthew Field, David Stirling, Montserrat Ros, Zengxi Stephen Pan, Fazel Naghdy

zengxi pan

This paper proposes a series of methods for representing changes in human motion during injury rehabilitation using Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) inertial sensors. Tracking the changes over a recovery period requires methods for evaluating the similarity of movement in an impaired state against a non-impaired state. We investigate the use of motion analyses such as the centre of mass (COM) tipping distance, the variance of joint velocity eigenvalues and the cumulative state changes of Gaussian mixture models (GMM) for monitoring the symmetry between the left and right sides of body during rehabilitation exercises. The methods are tested on an injured athlete …

Answering Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Concerns; A Matter Of Science And Time, David Hawkes, Candice E. Lea, Matthew J. Berryman

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Since the introduction of the HPV vaccine, questions have been asked about its efficacy in preventing cancer linked with HPV. Concerns about the HPV vaccine safety profile have also been raised. This paper highlights the rapidly growing body of evidence (including clinical trials and post-marketing surveillance) illustrating both the safety of the HPV vaccine, through a detailed investigation of reported adverse events, and its efficacy in reducing both HPV infections rates and the resulting drop in cervical lesions, which have been demonstrated to be good predictors of cervical cancer risk.

Dynamic Fingerprint Based On Human Motion And Posture, Amir Hesami, Fazel Naghdy, David Stirling

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The feasibility of generating a Dynamic FingerPrint (DFP) for an individual is explored. DFP is a unique signature generated based on a combination of body part movements. The body movements are obtained using a sensor suit recording inertial signals that are subsequently modeled on a humanoid frame with 23 degrees of freedom (DOF). Measured signals include position, velocity, acceleration, orientation, angular velocity and angular acceleration. DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) is XVHG WR FODVVLI\ WKH LQGLYLGXDO¶V identity. The approach is described and the characteristics of the algorithms are presented. It is anticipated that these approaches will have applications in surveillance and …

Inter-Occlusion Reasoning For Human Detection Based On Variational Mean Field, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Wanqing Li, Philip O. Ogunbona

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Detecting multiple humans in crowded scenes is challenging because the humans are often partially or even totally occluded by each other. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for partial inter-occlusion reasoning in human detection based on variational mean field theory. The proposed algorithm can be integrated with various part-based human detectors using different types of features, object representations, and classifiers. The algorithm takes as the input an initial set of possible human objects (hypotheses) detected using a part-based human detector. Each hypothesis is decomposed into a number of parts and the occlusion status of each part is inferred …

An Image-Based Approach For Classification Of Human Micro-Doppler Radar Signatures, Fok Hing Chi Tivive, Son Lam Phung, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

With the advances in radar technology, there is an increasing interest in automatic radar-based human gait identification. This is because radar signals can penetrate through most dielectric materials. In this paper, an image-based approach is proposed for classifying human micro-Doppler radar signatures. The time-varying radar signal is first converted into a time-frequency representation, which is then cast as a two-dimensional image. A descriptor is developed to extract micro-Doppler features from local time-frequency patches centered along the torso Doppler frequency. Experimental results based on real data collected from a 24-GHz Doppler radar showed that the proposed approach achieves promising classification performance.

Inertial Sensing For Human Motor Control Symmetry In Injury Rehabilitation, Matthew Field, David Stirling, Montserrat Ros, Zengxi Stephen Pan, Fazel Naghdy

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

This paper proposes a series of methods for representing changes in human motion during injury rehabilitation using Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) inertial sensors. Tracking the changes over a recovery period requires methods for evaluating the similarity of movement in an impaired state against a non-impaired state. We investigate the use of motion analyses such as the centre of mass (COM) tipping distance, the variance of joint velocity eigenvalues and the cumulative state changes of Gaussian mixture models (GMM) for monitoring the symmetry between the left and right sides of body during rehabilitation exercises. The methods are tested on an injured athlete …

Wearable Sensors In Intelligent Clothing For Measuring Human Body Temperature Based On Optical Fiber Bragg Grating, Hongqiang Li, Haijiang Yang, Enbang Li, Zhihui Liu, Kejia Wei

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Measuring body temperature is considerably important to physiological studies as well as clinical investigations. In recent years, numerous observations have been reported and various methods of measurement have been employed. The present paper introduces a novel wearable sensor in intelligent clothing for human body temperature measurement. The objective is the integration of optical fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based sensors into functional textiles to extend the capabilities of wearable solutions for body temperature monitoring. In addition, the temperature sensitivity is 150 pm/°C, which is almost 15 times higher than that of a bare FBG. This study combines large and small pipes during …

Compressive Evaluation In Human Motion Tracking, Yifan Lu, Lei Wang, Richard Hartley, Hongdong Li, Dan Xu

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The powerful theory of compressive sensing enables an efficient way to recover sparse or compressible signals from non-adaptive, sub-Nyquist-rate linear measurements. In particular, it has been shown that random projections can well approximate an isometry, provided that the number of linear measurements is no less than twice of the sparsity level of the signal. Inspired by these, we propose a compressive anneal particle filter to exploit sparsity existing in image-based human motion tracking. Instead of performing full signal recovery, we evaluate the observation likelihood directly in the compressive domain of the observed images. Moreover, we introduce a progressive multilevel wavelet …

On Using Human Movement Invariants To Generate Target-Driven Anthropomorphic Locomotion, Manish Sreenivasa, Philippe Souères, Jean-Paul Laumond

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

We present a method for generating anthropomorphic motion by studying `invariants' in human movements and applying them as kinematic tasks. We recorded whole-body motion of 14 participants during a walking and grasping task and performed a detailed analysis in order to synthesize the stereotypy in human motion as rules. We propose an algorithm that produces the key parameters of motion taking into account the knowledge from human movement, and the limitations of the anthropomorph. We generalize our results such that we can create motion parameters for objects which were not in the original protocol. The algorithmic output is applied in …

On Real-Time Whole-Body Human To Humanoid Motion Transfer, Francisco-Javier Montecillo-Puente, Manish Sreenivasa, Jean-Paul Laumond

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

We present a framework for online imitation of human motion by the humanoid robot HRP-2. We introduce a representation of human motion, the humanoid-Normalized model, and a Center of Mass (CoM) anticipation model to prepare the robot in case the human lifts his/her foot. Our proposed motion representation codifies operational space and geometric information. Whole body robot motion is computed using a task-based prioritized inverse kinematics solver. By setting the human motion model as the target, and giving the maintenance of robot CoM a high priority, we can achieve a large range of motion imitation. We present two scenarios of …

Inverse Optimal Control As A Tool To Understand Human Yoyo Playing, Katja Mombaur, Manish Sreenivasa

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

This paper presents an inverse optimal control approach to identify objective functions of human motion from motion capture measurements. We apply it to analyze human yoyo playing. Yoyo playing may seem easy to us to learn but it is a challenging problem from a mechanical point of view involving a hybrid dynamics model. We recorded vertical yoyo playing of humans measuring yoyo height and rotation angle as well as the corresponding hand motions. Results of inverse optimal control are presented showing a mixed criterion of cycle time and terms depending on yoyo and hand acceleration and velocity.

Hrp-2 Plays The Yoyo: From Human To Humanoid Yoyo Playing Using Optimal Control, Katja Mombaur, Manish Sreenivasa

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Yoyo playing may seem easy for a human, but it is a challenging problem for a humanoid robot. This paper presents an approach to generate yoyo motions for the humanoid robot, HRP-2, based on motion recorded from human yoyo playing, dynamical models and numerical optimal control techniques. We recorded vertical yoyo playing of 4 subjects measuring yoyo height and rotation angle as well as the corresponding hand motions. A detailed multi-phase yoyo model with impact collisions and control patterns of human yoyo playing were identified from these measurements. Based on this knowledge, reliable yoyo motions within the feasibility ranges of …

Human Visual Perception Of Region Warping Distortions With Different Display And Scene Characteristics, Yang-Wai Chow, Ronald Pose, Matthew Regan, James Phillips

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

This paper presents human visual perception experiment results for a computer graphics rendering technique introduced in ACSC'05. In order to achieve a good immersive virtual reality experience, it is necessary to have at least 60 frames per second to ensure smooth motion. It is also necessary to have low end-to-end latency so that user interaction does not suffer from perceptible delays in images presented to the eyes. The Address Recalculation Pipeline (ARP) architecture reduces end-to-end latency in immersive Head Mounted Display (HMD) virtual reality systems. By using the ARP in conjunction with priority rendering, different sections of the scene are …

Comparison Of Channelized Hotelling And Human Observers In Determining Optimum Os-Em Reconstruction Parameters For Myocardial Spect, Karen L. Gilland, Benjamin M. W Tsui, Yujin Qi, Grant T. Gullberg

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The performance of the Channelized Hotelling Observer (CHO) was compared to that of human observers for determining optimum parameters for the iterative OS-EM image reconstruction method for the task of defect detection in myocardial SPECT images. The optimum parameters were those that maximized defect detectability in the SPECT images. Low noise, parallel SPECT projection data, with and without an anterior, inferior or lateral LV wall defect, were simulated using the Monte Carlo method. Poisson noise was added to generate noisy realizations. Data were reconstructed using OS-EM at 1 & 4 subsets/iteration and at 1, 3, 5, 7 & 9 iterations. …

Massive Increase In The Stiffness Of The Human Lens Nucleus With Age: The Basis For Presbyopia?, Karl Robert Heys, Sandra Leigh Cram, Roger J W Truscott

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Purpose: To determine the stiffness of different regions of human lenses as a function of age, and to correlate the biophysical measurements in the lens center with nuclear water content.

Methods: A custom made probe fitted to a dynamic mechanical analyzer was employed to measure stiffness values at 1 mm increments across equatorial sections of individual human lenses. Thermogravimetric analysis was used to determine the percentage water content in the nuclei of human lenses.

Results: There was a pronounced increase in lens stiffness over the age range from 14 to 78. In the nucleus, stiffness values varied almost 1,000 fold …

Identification Of Giardia Lamblia-Specific Antigens In Infected Human And Gerbil Feces By Western Immunoblotting, Henry H. Stibbs, Mansour Samadpour, Jerry E. Ongerth

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Western immunoblot analysis of aqueous extracts of feces obtained from five giardiasis patients and from experimentally infected gerbils (Meriones unguiculatus) with rabbit antiserum to Giardia lamblia cysts has revealed antigens of three molecular weight groups. A stepladderlike, evenly-spaced set of strongly reactive antigens (darkest at a molecular weight [m.w.] of 55,000 to 70,000) appeared in the gerbil feces from day 4 (first experiment) or day 2 (second experiment) and lasted to about day 7 but disappeared completely by day 8 and did not reappear later. These antigenic bands were seen in gerbils infected with two isolates of G. lamblia. These …