Setting up complex home appliances operation system

  Hierarchical command space
The command space is divided by some floors to associate many appliance operation with the limited command space on the desk. An arbitrary number of hierarchies can add. The hierarchy is changed when selecting a command space that associates hierarchical changes, and when performing specific home electronics operations. In addition, it can be confirmed by voice guidance that the hierarchy has been changed.
  Synthesis of commands
By associating a plurality of operations in one command space, it’s possible to operate complicated home appliance operation with less operation.

-Intelligent Room-

  This intelligent room study is free of operator's based on gesture recognition technologies. Intention and position of an operator is recognized by detecting the hand waving, and pan-tilt cameras are zoomed and focused on the operator. The hand region is extracted using information, and direction set are controlled by using the direction or number of fingers and motion of the hands.
-conference papers-

Irie, K.; Wada, M.; Umeda, K., "3D Measurement by Distributed Camera System for Constructing an Intelligent Room," Networked Sensing Systems, 2007. INSS '07. Fourth International Conference on Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/INSS.2007.4297403 Publication Year: 2007 , Page(s): 118 - 121

Irie, K.; Wakamura, N.; Umeda, K., "Construction of an intelligent room based on gesture recognition: operation of electric appliances with hand gestures," Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2004. (IROS 2004). Proceedings. 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Volume: 1 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/IROS.2004.1389351 Publication Year: 2004 , Page(s): 193 - 198 vol.1

Gesture Recognition Based on the Detection of Periodic Motion

  We propose a method to recognize periodic gestures from images. The proposed method uses a amplitude spectrum and a phase spectrum that are obtained by applying Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to a time series of intensity images. FFT is applied to each pixel of low-resolution images. The method consists of 2 steps. First, the method detects periodic motion regions from the amplitude spectrum. Secondly, the method uses the phase spectrum in the detected periodic motion region to classify the gestures. The proposed method is robust to lighting conditions and individual differences in skin color because it does not rely on color information. Additionally, the proposed method is possible to recognize periodic gestures when multiple target regions, for example, two or more individuals are observed.

Skin Color Registration Using Recognition of Waving Hands

  This paper proposes skin color registration using the recognition of waving hands. In order to recognize hand gestures from images, skin colors are useful information. The proposed method can register skin colors simply and quickly, because it uses just a few waves of the hands. The method consists of 2 steps. First, the regions of the waving hands are extracted from low-resolution images without using color information. Second, the color values of the extracted regions are classified into background colors and hand colors depending on time series of color images. The color information classified as hand colors is registered as skin colors. The proposed method is robust against lighting conditions and individual differences in skin color, because the skin color is registered as an adapted skin color in each case. Several experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. -conference papers-

Kota Irie, Masahito Takahashi, Kenji Terabayashi, Hidetoshi Ogishima, Kazunori Umeda: "Skin Color Registration Using Recognition of Waving Hands," Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp.262-272, 2010.06.

Mouth Motion Recognition

  Today, functions of household appliances have been sophisticated. Because of this, a problem of troublesomeness for complications of operation occurs. Therefore, we are trying to enable you to operate appliances by only moving your lip.
  Our system finds an operator’s lip area from images obtained the camera set at the same height of the operator face, and then lip movements are distinguished using changes of pixel value in that area and the aspect ratio of lips.
  This system can be used in noisy environment because it uses only lip movements.