TETMAN: Three-dimensional Exploitation Techniques for Moving And Non-rigid targets

Humans may visibly reveal their disposition or intent through body actions. Recognizing these body activities often is key to determining human intent. Human activities involve 3D bodies in a 3D environment, current imaging technologies try to recognize body activities from their 2D projections. Photon-X uses proprietary spatial phase imaging technology which acquires high-resolution 3D video imagery in real time. The SPI sensor continuously builds a moving scene into dense 3D geometry. The technology makes possible markerless tracking of non-rigid forms. This enables unprecedented measurement of 3D human activity. Photon-X used the SPI sensor to capture real-time 3D videos of body activities. Photon-X also demonstrated the ability to extract and measure motion parameters from 3D videos by representing activity as a sequence of skeleton motions. Photon-X proposes to develop algorithms for determining behavioral intent based on action recognition of body motions and facial expressions in context. Research objectives: • Markerless 3D tracking of human body actions. Interpretation of actions. • 3D tracking of body parts. Interpretation of actions. • 3D micro- and macro-facial expression analysis. • Classification of facial-expressions into emotions. • Intent determination from the correlation of body motion and facial expression. BENEFIT: Developing these 3D human sensing capabilities can result in numerous military and commercial applications, including: • Intelligent surveillance – detecting subjects from ground-based or UAV platforms; gaze tracking to determine which direction a person is looking; classifying actions such as walking, running, roaming in an irregular pattern, turning head, depositing parcels or other objects. • Security industry – security monitoring for trespassers; group segmentation to differentiate individuals at a security access point. • Movie and Video game industries – human motion modeling for character animation. • Ergonomics – human-computer interaction; remote control by gesture. • Retailing – observing shoppers for product interest. • Health care – in physical therapy, measuring range of motion and proper movement sequence in rehabilitation therapy. • Video mining – 2D video mining for video databases, 3D video mining for game industries or for existing 3D video depositories on the World Wide Web.