Visual Recognition and Tracking for Perceptive Interfaces

Devices should be perceptive, and respond directly to their human user and/or environment. In this talk I’ll present new computer vision algorithms for fast recognition, indexing, and tracking that make this possible, enabling multimodal interfaces which respond to users’ conversational gesture and body language, robots which recognize common object categories, and mobile devices which can search using visual cues of specific objects of interest. As time permits, I’ll describe recent advances in real-time human pose tracking for multimodal interfaces, including new methods which exploit fast computation of approximate likelihood with a pose-sensitive image embedding. I’ll also present our linear-time approximate correspondence kernel, the Pyramid Match, and its use for image indexing and object recognition, and discovery of object categories. Throughout the talk, I’ll show interface examples including grounded multimodal conversation as well as mobile image-based information retrieval applications based on these techniques.