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1. Real-Time Assembly Operation Recognition with Fog Computing and Transfer Learning for Human-Centered Intelligent Manufacturing

   Tao, W; Al-Amin, M; Chen, H; Leu, M; Yin, Z; Qin, R (June 2020, Procedia manufacturing)

   null (Ed.)

   In a human-centered intelligent manufacturing system, every element is to assist the operator in achieving the optimal operational performance. The primary task of developing such a human-centered system is to accurately understand human behavior. In this paper, we propose a fog computing framework for assembly operation recognition, which brings computing power to the data source, to achieve real-time recognition. The operator’s activity is captured using visual cameras. Instead of directly training a deep learning model from scratch, transfer learning is applied to transfer the learning abilities to our application. A worker assembly operation dataset is established, which at present contains 10 sequential operations in an assembly task of installing a desktop CNC machine. The developed model is evaluated on this dataset and achieves a recognition accuracy of 95% in the testing experiments. 

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2. Automated Filtering Big Visual Data from Drones for Enhanced Visual Analytics in Construction

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784481264.039  

   Kamari, MirSalar; Ham, Youngjib (March 2018, ASCE Construction Research Congress 2018)

   Nowadays, to assess and document construction and building performance, large amount of visual data are captured and stored through camera equipped platforms such as wearable cameras, unmanned aerial/ground vehicles, and smart phones. However, due to the nonstop fashion in recording such visual data, not all of the frames in captured consecutive footages are intentionally taken, and thus not every frame is worthy of being processed for construction and building performance analysis. Since many frames will simply have non-construction related contents, before processing the visual data, the content of each recorded frame should be manually investigated depending on the association with the goal of the visual assessment. To address such challenges, this paper aims to automatically filter construction big visual data that requires no human annotations. To overcome challenges in pure discriminative approach using manually labeled images, we construct a generative model with unlabeled visual dataset, and use it to find construction-related frames in big visual dataset from jobsites. First, through composition-based snap point detection together with domain adaptation, we filter and remove most of accidently recorded frames in the footage. Then, we create discriminative classifier trained with visual data from jobsites to eliminate non-construction related images. To evaluate the reliability of the proposed method, we have obtained the ground truth based on human judgment for each photo in our testing dataset. Despite learning without any explicit labels, the proposed method shows a reasonable practical range of accuracy, which generally outperforms prior snap point detection. Through the case studies, the fidelity of the algorithm is discussed in detail. By being able to focus on selective visual data, practitioners will spend less time on browsing large amounts of visual data; rather spend more time on looking at how to leverage the visual data to facilitate decision-makings in built environments. 

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3. HoloSet - A Dataset for Visual-Inertial Pose Estimation in Extended Reality: Dataset

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3560905.3567763  

   Chandio, Yasra; Bashir, Noman; Anwar, Fatima M. (November 2022, ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems)

   There is a lack of datasets for visual-inertial odometry applications in Extended Reality (XR). To the best of our knowledge, there is no dataset available that is captured from an XR headset with a human as a carrier. To bridge this gap, we present a novel pose estimation dataset --- called HoloSet --- collected using Microsoft Hololens 2, which is a state-of-the-art head mounted device for XR. Potential applications for HoloSet include visual-inertial odometry, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and additional applications in XR that leverage visual-inertial data. HoloSet captures both macro and micro movements. For macro movements, the dataset consists of more than 66,000 samples of visual, inertial, and depth camera data in a variety of environments (indoor, outdoor) and scene setups (trails, suburbs, downtown) under multiple user action scenarios (walk, jog). For micro movements, the dataset consists of more than 12,000 samples of additional articulated hand depth camera images while a user plays games that exercise fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. We present basic visualizations and high-level statistics of the data and outline the potential research use cases for HoloSet. 

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4. Human Supervision is Key to Achieving Accurate AI-assisted Wildlife Identifications in Camera Trap Images

   https://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.752  

   Huebner, Sarah E; Palmer, Meredith S; Packer, Craig (January 2024, Citizen Science: Theory and Practice)

   Fortson, Lucy; Crowston, Kevin; Kloetzer, Laure; Ponti, Marisa (Ed.)

   Using public support to extract information from vast datasets has become a popular method for accurately labeling wildlife data in camera trap (CT) images. However, the increasing demand for volunteer effort lengthens the time interval between data collection and our ability to draw ecological inferences or perform data-driven conservation actions. Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are currently highly effective for species detection (i.e., whether an image contains animals or not) and labeling common species; however, it performs poorly on species rarely captured in images and those that are highly visually similar to one another. To capitalize on the best of human and AI classifying methods, we developed an integrated CT data pipeline in which AI provides an initial pass on labeling images, but is supervised and validated by humans (i.e., a “human-in-the-loop” approach). To assess classification accuracy gains, we compare the precision of species labels produced by AI and HITL protocols to a “gold standard” (GS) dataset annotated by wildlife experts. The accuracy of the AI method was species-dependent and positively correlated with the number of training images. The combined efforts of HITL led to error rates of less than 10% for 73% of the dataset and lowered the error rates for an additional 23%. For two visually similar species, human input resulted in higher error rates than AI. While integrating humans in the loop increases classification times relative to AI alone, the gains in accuracy suggest that this method is highly valuable for high-volume CT surveys. 

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5. An Interactive Framework for Visually Realistic 3D Motion Synthesis using Evolutionarily-trained Spiking Neural Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3585509  

   Polykretis, Ioannis; Patil, Aditi; Aanjaneya, Mridul; Michmizos, Konstantinos (May 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques)

   We present an end-to-end method for capturing the dynamics of 3D human characters and translating them for synthesizing new, visually-realistic motion sequences. Conventional methods employ sophisticated, but generic, control approaches for driving the joints of articulated characters, paying little attention to the distinct dynamics of human joint movements. In contrast, our approach attempts to synthesize human-like joint movements by exploiting a biologically-plausible, compact network of spiking neurons that drive joint control in primates and rodents. We adapt the controller architecture by introducing learnable components and propose an evolutionary algorithm for training the spiking neural network architectures and capturing diverse joint dynamics. Our method requires only a few samples for capturing the dynamic properties of a joint's motion and exploits the biologically-inspired, trained controller for its reconstruction. More importantly, it can transfer the captured dynamics to new visually-plausible motion sequences. To enable user-dependent tailoring of the resulting motion sequences, we develop an interactive framework that allows for editing and real-time visualization of the controlled 3D character. We also demonstrate the applicability of our method to real human motion capture data by learning the hand joint dynamics from a gesture dataset and using our framework to reconstruct the gestures with our 3D animated character. The compact architecture of our joint controller emerging from its biologically-realistic design, and the inherent capacity of our evolutionary learning algorithm for parallelization, suggest that our approach could provide an efficient and scalable alternative for synthesizing 3D character animations with diverse and visually-realistic motion dynamics. 

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