Computer vision techniques and applications in human-computer interaction

• Authors: Erno Mäkinen
• Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
• Year: 2004

There has been much research on computer vision in last three decades. Computer vision methods have been developed for different situations. One example is a detection of human face. For computers face detection is hard. Faces look different from different viewing directions. Facial expressions affect to the look of the face. Each individual person has a unique face. The lightning conditions can vary and so on. However, face detection is currently possible in limited conditions. In addition, there are some methods that can be used for gender recognition [3], face recognition [5] and facial expression recognition [2]. Nonetheless, there has been very little research on how to combine these methods. There has also been quite little research on how to apply these methods in human-computer interaction (HCI). Finding sets of techniques that complement each other in a useful way is one research challenge. There are some applications that take advantage of one or two computer vision techniques. For example, Christian and Avery [1] have developed an information kiosk that uses computer vision to detect potential users from a distance. A similar kiosk has been developed by us in the University of Tampere [4]. There are also some games that use simple computer vision techniques for the interaction. However, there are very few applications that use several computer vision techniques together such as face detection, facial expression recognition and gender recognition. Overall, there has been very little effort in combining different techniques. In my research I develop computer vision methods and combine them, so that the combined method can detect face, recognize gender and facial expressions. After successfully combining the methods, it is easier to develop HCI applications that take advantage of computer vision. Applications that can be used by small group of people are my specific interest. These applications allow me to build adaptive user interfaces and analyze the use of computer vision techniques in improving human-computer interaction.