From PHYSORG


(PhysOrg.com) -- Hugs and kisses exchanged under the mistletoe are among the human interactions which can now be automatically recognized by computers from video footage, thanks to new research.
 
The technology, developed at Oxford University, can also automatically recognize interactions such as handshakes and high fives. It is part of research to enable computers to automatically analyse the content of the vast amount of video footage generated from sources such as TV, films, YouTube and CCTV.

"Human actions and activities are of central importance in video analysis," said Alonso Patron-Perez of Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Science, who led the research. "This new work makes it possible to recognise two-person human interactions, such as hugs, kisses and hand-shakes, automatically. Once you can recognize these interactions the applications are numerous: for instance you could automatically search home videos and YouTube for kisses and handshakes or even fast forward CCTV to find incidents."

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From New scientist

Smartphone app monitors your every move


CAN'T be bothered to tell your Facebook friends what you are up to? A smartphone app called Jigsaw can help.

Jigsaw figures out what you are doing by monitoring your phone's microphone, GPS and accelerometer for patterns characteristic of routine activities - and it could be set to send the results to social networking sites.

More importantly, Jigsaw can log how active you are each day, producing records that could be useful to a doctor or fitness trainer. Its pattern-recognition algorithms can identify a range of behaviours, making its logs more detailed than those of similar apps, says Hong Lu at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who developed the app in collaboration with the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California.

For example, the jolts produced when the user is walking depend on whether the phone is in a trouser or jacket pocket, so the software can recognise both patterns. Information from the other sensors helps to further define the activity.

The less active you are, the less often Jigsaw kicks in, so it can capture your activity patterns while minimising the drain on the phone's battery. "If you're stationary there's no point in getting regular GPS readings," says Lu. He adds that a smartphone running Jigsaw in the background would get 12 hours of use from the battery, so you can log your behaviour from morning till night on a single charge. "Without smart power management it would drain the battery in 6 hours," Lu says.

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FROM FAST COMPANY

Coming Soon: Movie Screens That Watch You Back, Measure Your Reactions


Movie theater technology is getting a novel tweak--it'll start watching audiences to see how they react to movies and ads. The silver screen is set to watch you back, and it's all in the cause of market research.

Some theaters have already been watching you for years, but only to make sure you're not recording the show. Cameras embedded in the screen can detect the tell-tale infra-red signature of a digital camera. But that was just the first step. Aralia Systems, a U.K. high-tech security firm, just earned nearly $350,000 in a grant from the University of the West of England to turn those cameras into a system for gauging audience reaction to films and advertising.

We're not talking about a dumb clapometer-style system, either. The intention is to produce rich data that can measure the details of an individual's face. Aralia will leverage 3-D face recognition technology that the university is already developing. When you sit in the audience of a theater with their system, you'll be illuminated with an infra-red beam, and three or more cameras will continually monitor the crowd to create stereoscopic images--just like the 3-D digital cameras that are now launching on the consumer markets.

The system should be able to detect a great deal. It will know the direction your face is pointing in, your expression, whether you're shocked by something, whether you're sitting in a family group or on your own, at what point you get bored, and so on. This is invaluable data for marketers, who can gauge how well their ad messages are getting across. Potentially, they could change the ad's placement in the reel between showings to see if they get a better reaction. And it isn't just the ad reel, of course. Movie studios have been running test screenings for years--they'd love to get a sense of which scenes to cut, without having to go through the fuss of having audiences fill out surveys.


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