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Smart ear-worn devices (called earables) are being equipped with various onboard sensors and algorithms, transforming earphones from simple audio transducers to multi-modal interfaces making rich inferences about human motion and vital signals. However, developing sensory applications using earables is currently quite cumbersome with several barriers in the way. First, time-series data from earable sensors incorporate information about physical phenomena in complex settings, requiring machine-learning (ML) models learned from large-scale labeled data. This is challenging in the context of earables because large-scale open-source datasets are missing. Secondly, the small size and compute constraints of earable devices make on-device integration of many existing algorithms for tasks such as human activity and head-pose estimation difficult. To address these challenges, we introduce Auritus, an extendable and open-source optimization toolkit designed to enhance and replicate earable applications. Auritus serves two primary functions. Firstly, Auritus handles data collection, pre-processing, and labeling tasks for creating customized earable datasets using graphical tools. The system includes an open-source dataset with 2.43 million inertial samples related to head and full-body movements, consisting of 34 head poses and 9 activities from 45 volunteers. Secondly, Auritus provides a tightly-integrated hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) optimizer and TinyML interface to develop lightweight and real-time machine-learning (ML) models for activity detection and filters for head-pose tracking. To validate the utlity of Auritus, we showcase three sample applications, namely fall detection, spatial audio rendering, and augmented reality (AR) interfacing. Auritus recognizes activities with 91% leave 1-out test accuracy (98% test accuracy) using real-time models as small as 6-13 kB. Our models are 98-740x smaller and 3-6% more accurate over the state-of-the-art. We also estimate head pose with absolute errors as low as 5 degrees using 20kB filters, achieving up to 1.6x precision improvement over existing techniques. We make the entire system open-source so that researchers and developers can contribute to any layer of the system or rapidly prototype their applications using our dataset and algorithms.
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Mobile. Egocentric Human Body Motion Reconstruction Using Only Eyeglasses-mounted Cameras and a Few Body-worn Inertial Sensors
We envision a convenient telepresence system available to users anywhere, anytime. Such a system requires displays and sensors embedded in commonly worn items such as eyeglasses, wristwatches, and shoes. To that end, we present a standalone real-time system for the dynamic 3D capture of a person, relying only on cameras embedded into a head-worn device, and on Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) worn on the wrists and ankles. Our prototype system egocentrically reconstructs the wearer's motion via learning-based pose estimation, which fuses inputs from visual and inertial sensors that complement each other, overcoming challenges such as inconsistent limb visibility in head-worn views, as well as pose ambiguity from sparse IMUs. The estimated pose is continuously re-targeted to a prescanned surface model, resulting in a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction. We demonstrate our system by reconstructing various human body movements and show that our visual-inertial learning-based method, which runs in real time, outperforms both visual-only and inertial-only approaches. We captured an egocentric visual-inertial 3D human pose dataset publicly available at https://sites.google.com/site/youngwooncha/egovip for training and evaluating similar methods.
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- PAR ID:
- 10300348
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 616 to 625
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/VR50410.2021.00087
