A Real-time Face/Hand Tracking Method for Chinese Sign Language Recognition

This paper introduces a new Chinese Sign Language recognition (CSLR) system and a method of real time tracking face and hand applied in the system. In the method, an improved agent algorithm is used to extract the region of face and hand and track them. Kalman filter is introduced to forecast the position and rectangle of search, and self adapting of target color is designed to counteract the effect of illumination.

Novel Real-Time Seam Tracking Algorithm Based on Vector Angle and Least Square Method

Real-time seam tracking can improve welding quality and enhance welding efficiency during the welding process in automobile manufacturing.However,the teaching-playing welding process,an off-line seam tracking method,is still dominant in automobile industry,which is less flexible when welding objects or situation change.A novel real-time algorithm consisting of seam detection and generation is proposed to track seam.Using captured 3D points,space vectors were created between two adjacent points along each laser line and then a vector angle based algorithm was developed to detect target points on the seam.Least square method was used to fit target points to a welding trajectory for seam tracking.Furthermore,the real-time seam tracking process was simulated in MATLAB/Simulink.The trend of joint angles vs.time was logged and a comparison between the off-line and the proposed seam tracking algorithm was conducted.Results show that the proposed real-time seam tracking algorithm can work in a real-time scenario and have high accuracy in welding point positioning.

A machine vision approach to seam tracking in real-time in PAW of large-diameter stainless steel tube

Manual monitoring and seam tracking through watching weld pool images in real-time, by naked eyes or by industrial TV, are experience-depended, subjective, labor intensive, and sometimes biased. So it is necessary to realize the automation of computer-aided seam tracking. A PAW (plasma arc welding) seam tracking system was developed, which senses the molten pool and the seam in one frame by a vision sensor, and then detects the seam deviation to adjust the work piece motion adaptively to the seam position sensed by vision sensor. A novel molten pool area image-processing algorithm based on machine vision was proposed. The algorithm processes each image at the speed of 20 frames/second in real-time to extract three feature variables to get the seam deviation. It is proved experimentally that the algorithm is very fast and effective. Issues related to the algorithm are also discussed.

Real-time accurate hand path tracking and joint trajectory planning for industrial robots(Ⅰ)

Previously, researchers raised the accuracy for a robot′s hand to track a specified path in Car-tesian space mainly through increasing the number of knots on the path and the number of the path′s segments, which results in the heavier online computational burden for the robot controller. Aiming at overcoming this drawback, the authors propose a new kind of real-time accurate hand path tracking and joint trajectory planning method. Through selecting some extra knots on the specified hand path by a certain rule and introducing a sinusoidal function to the joint displacement equation of each segment, this method can greatly raise the path tracking accuracy of robot′s hand and does not change the number of the path′s segments. It also does not increase markedly the computational burden of robot controller. The result of simulation indicates that this method is very effective, and has important value in increasing the application of industrial robots.

Real-time accurate hand path tracking and joint trajectory planning for industrial robots(Ⅱ)

Previously, researchers raised the accuracy for a robot′s hand to track a specified path in Cartesian space mainly through increasing the number of knots on the path and the segments of the path. But, this method resulted in the heavier on line computational burden for the robot controller. In this paper, aiming at this drawback, the authors propose a new kind of real time accurate hand path tracking and joint trajectory planning method for robots. Through selecting some extra knots on the specified hand path by a certain rule, which enables the number of knots on each segment to increase from two to four, and through introducing a sinusoidal function and a cosinoidal function to the joint displacement equation of each segment, this method can raise the path tracking accuracy of robot′s hand greatly but does not increase the computational burden of robot controller markedly.

Real-time tracking of deformable objects based on MOK algorithm

The traditional oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF（ORB） algorithm has problems of instability and repetition of keypoints and it does not possess scale invariance. In order to deal with these drawbacks, a modified ORB（MORB） algorithm is proposed. In order to improve the precision of matching and tracking, this paper puts forward an MOK algorithm that fuses MORB and Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi（KLT）. By using Kalman, the object＇s state in the next frame is predicted in order to reduce the size of search window and improve the real-time performance of object tracking. The experimental results show that the MOK algorithm can accurately track objects with deformation or with background clutters, exhibiting higher robustness and accuracy on diverse datasets. Also, the MOK algorithm has a good real-time performance with the average frame rate reaching 90.8 fps.

Drone for Dynamic Monitoring and Tracking with Intelligent Image Analysis

Traditional monitoring systems that are used in shopping malls or com-munity management,mostly use a remote control to monitor and track specific objects;therefore,it is often impossible to effectively monitor the entire environ-ment.Whenfinding a suspicious person,the tracked object cannot be locked in time for tracking.This research replaces the traditionalfixed-point monitor with the intelligent drone and combines the image processing technology and automatic judgment for the movements of the monitored person.This intelligent system can effectively improve the shortcomings of low efficiency and high cost of the traditional monitor system.In this article,we proposed a TIMT(The Intel-ligent Monitoring and Tracking)algorithm which can make the drone have smart surveillance and tracking capabilities.It combined with Artificial Intelligent(AI)face recognition technology and the OpenPose which is able to monitor the phy-sical movements of multiple people in real time to analyze the meaning of human body movements and to track the monitored intelligently through the remote con-trol interface of the drone.This system is highly agile and could be adjusted immediately to any angle and screen that we monitor.Therefore,the system couldfind abnormal conditions immediately and track and monitor them automatically.That is the system can immediately detect when someone invades the home or community,and the drone can automatically track the intruder to achieve that the two significant shortcomings of the traditional monitor will be improved.Experimental results show that the intelligent monitoring and tracking drone sys-tem has an excellent performance,which not only dramatically reduces the num-ber of monitors and the required equipment but also achieves perfect monitoring and tracking.

Multiple-Object Tracking Using Histogram Stamp Extraction in CCTV Environments

Object tracking,an important technology in the field of image processing and computer vision,is used to continuously track a specific object or person in an image.This technology may be effective in identifying the same person within one image,but it has limitations in handling multiple images owing to the difficulty in identifying whether the object appearing in other images is the same.When tracking the same object using two or more images,there must be a way to determine that objects existing in different images are the same object.Therefore,this paper attempts to determine the same object present in different images using color information among the unique information of the object.Thus,this study proposes a multiple-object-tracking method using histogram stamp extraction in closed-circuit television applications.The proposed method determines the presence or absence of a target object in an image by comparing the similarity between the image containing the target object and other images.To this end,a unique color value of the target object is extracted based on its color distribution in the image using three methods:mean,mode,and interquartile range.The Top-N accuracy method is used to analyze the accuracy of each method,and the results show that the mean method had an accuracy of 93.5%(Top-2).Furthermore,the positive prediction value experimental results show that the accuracy of the mean method was 65.7%.As a result of the analysis,it is possible to detect and track the same object present in different images using the unique color of the object.Through the results,it is possible to track the same object that can minimize manpower without using personal information when detecting objects in different images.In the last response speed experiment,it was shown that when the mean was used,the color extraction of the object was possible in real time with 0.016954 s.Through this,it is possible to detect and track the same object in real time when using the proposed method.

Real-time localization for underwater equipment using an extremely low frequency electric field

A new real-time underwater equipment location method adopting an electric field induced by a standard current source is proposed.Our goals were real-time tracking and location of stationary or moving underwater equipment both in shallow and deep seas,under noisy conditions.The main features of this method are as follows:(1)a standard current source on the water surface,which can be towed by a vehicle,consisting of two electrodes,a signal generator,and a GPS unit;(2)measurement of the extremely low frequency(ELF)electric field emitted by the current source,made possible by electric field sensors on the underwater equipment;(3)position of the underwater equipment is estimated in real time based on a progressive update extended Kalman filter(PUEKF),which is carried out using the propagation model of an ELF electric field because the electric field at the position of the underwater equipment and the current source position are known.We verified the accuracy of our method and confirmed real-time location feasibility through numerical,physical scale,and real-time sea experiments.Through numerical experiments,we verified that our method works for underwater equipment location in real-world conditions,and the location error can be less than 0.2 m.Next,real-time location experiments for stationary underwater measuring equipment in water tank were conducted.The result shows that the location error can be less than 0.1 m.We also confirmed real-time location feasibility through the use of offshore experiment.We expect that our method will complement conventional underwater acoustic location methods for underwater equipment in acoustically noisy environments.

Dataset of Large Gathering Images for Person Identification and Tracking

This paper presents a large gathering dataset of images extracted from publicly filmed videos by 24 cameras installed on the premises of Masjid Al-Nabvi,Madinah,Saudi Arabia.This dataset consists of raw and processed images reflecting a highly challenging and unconstraint environment.The methodology for building the dataset consists of four core phases;that include acquisition of videos,extraction of frames,localization of face regions,and cropping and resizing of detected face regions.The raw images in the dataset consist of a total of 4613 frames obtained fromvideo sequences.The processed images in the dataset consist of the face regions of 250 persons extracted from raw data images to ensure the authenticity of the presented data.The dataset further consists of 8 images corresponding to each of the 250 subjects(persons)for a total of 2000 images.It portrays a highly unconstrained and challenging environment with human faces of varying sizes and pixel quality(resolution).Since the face regions in video sequences are severely degraded due to various unavoidable factors,it can be used as a benchmark to test and evaluate face detection and recognition algorithms for research purposes.We have also gathered and displayed records of the presence of subjects who appear in presented frames;in a temporal context.This can also be used as a temporal benchmark for tracking,finding persons,activity monitoring,and crowd counting in large crowd scenarios.

Robust multiple face tracking via mixture model

Based on particle filter framework,a robust tracker is proposed for tracking multiple faces of people moving in a scene.Although most existing algorithms are able to track human face well in controlled environments,they usually fail when human face appearance changes significantly or it is sheltered.To solve this problem,we propose a method using color,contour and texture information of human face together for tracking.Firstly,we use the color and contour model to track human faces in initial images and extract pixels belonging to human face color.Then these pixels are used to form a training set for setting up texture model on eigenspace representations.The two models then work together in following tracking.To reflect changes in human face appearance,update methods are also proposed for the two models including an adaptive-factor by which the texture model can be updated much more effectively when the human face's texture or rotation changes dramatically.Experiment results show that the proposed method is able to track human faces well under large appearance rotation changes,as well as in case of total occlusion by similar color objects.

High-speed railway track components inspection framework based on YOLOv8 with high-performance model deployment

Railway inspection poses significant challenges due to the extensive use of various components in vast railway networks,especially in the case of high-speed railways.These networks demand high maintenance but offer only limited inspection windows.In response,this study focuses on developing a high-performance rail inspection system tailored for high-speed railways and railroads with constrained inspection timeframes.This system leverages the latest artificial intelligence advancements,incorporating YOLOv8 for detection.Our research introduces an efficient model inference pipeline based on a producer-consumer model,effectively utilizing parallel processing and concurrent computing to enhance performance.The deployment of this pipeline,implemented using C++,TensorRT,float16 quantization,and oneTBB,represents a significant departure from traditional sequential processing methods.The results are remarkable,showcasing a substantial increase in processing speed:from 38.93 Frames Per Second(FPS)to 281.06 FPS on a desktop system equipped with an Nvidia RTX A6000 GPU and from 19.50 FPS to 200.26 FPS on the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin edge computing platform.This proposed framework has the potential to meet the real-time inspection requirements of high-speed railways.

Real-Time Multimodal Biometric Authentication of Human Using Face Feature Analysis

As multimedia data sharing increases,data security in mobile devices and its mechanism can be seen as critical.Biometrics combines the physiological and behavioral qualities of an individual to validate their character in real-time.Humans incorporate physiological attributes like a fingerprint,face,iris,palm print,finger knuckle print,Deoxyribonucleic Acid(DNA),and behavioral qualities like walk,voice,mark,or keystroke.The main goal of this paper is to design a robust framework for automatic face recognition.Scale Invariant Feature Transform(SIFT)and Speeded-up Robust Features(SURF)are employed for face recognition.Also,we propose a modified Gabor Wavelet Transform for SIFT/SURF(GWT-SIFT/GWT-SURF)to increase the recognition accuracy of human faces.The proposed scheme is composed of three steps.First,the entropy of the image is removed using Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT).Second,the computational complexity of the SIFT/SURF is reduced.Third,the accuracy is increased for authentication by the proposed GWT-SIFT/GWT-SURF algorithm.A comparative analysis of the proposed scheme is done on real-time Olivetti Research Laboratory(ORL)and Poznan University of Technology(PUT)databases.When compared to the traditional SIFT/SURF methods,we verify that the GWT-SIFT achieves the better accuracy of 99.32%and the better approach is the GWT-SURF as the run time of the GWT-SURF for 100 images is 3.4 seconds when compared to the GWT-SIFT which has a run time of 4.9 seconds for 100 images.

Human Faces Detection and Tracking for Crowd Management in Hajj and Umrah

Hajj and Umrah are two main religious duties for Muslims.To help faithfuls to perform their religious duties comfortably in overcrowded areas,a crowd management system is a must to control the entering and exiting for each place.Since the number of people is very high,an intelligent crowd management system can be developed to reduce human effort and accelerate the management process.In this work,we propose a crowd management process based on detecting,tracking,and counting human faces using Artificial Intelligence techniques.Human detection and counting will be performed to calculate the number of existing visitors and face detection and tracking will be used to identify all the humans for security purposes.The proposed crowd management system is composed form three main parts which are:(1)detecting human faces,(2)assigning each detected face with a numerical identifier,(3)storing the identity of each face in a database for further identification and tracking.The main contribution of this work focuses on the detection and tracking model which is based on an improved object detection model.The improved Yolo v4 was used for face detection and tracking.It has been very effective in detecting small objects in highresolution images.The novelty contained in thismethod was the integration of the adaptive attention mechanism to improve the performance of the model for the desired task.Channel wise attention mechanism was applied to the output layers while both channel wise and spatial attention was integrated in the building blocks.The main idea from the adaptive attention mechanisms is to make themodel focus more on the target and ignore false positive proposals.We demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method through expensive experimentation on a publicly available dataset.The wider faces dataset was used for the train and the evaluation of the proposed detection and tracking model.The proposed model has achieved good results with 91.2%of mAP and a processing speed of 18 FPS on the Nvidia GTX 960 GPU.

An Integrated Face Tracking and Facial Expression Recognition System

This article proposes a feature extraction method for an integrated face tracking and facial expression recognition in real time video. The method proposed by Viola and Jones [1] is used to detect the face region in the first frame of the video. A rectangular bounding box is fitted over for the face region and the detected face is tracked in the successive frames using the cascaded Support vector machine (SVM) and cascaded Radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). The haar-like features are extracted from the detected face region and they are used to create a cascaded SVM and RBFNN classifiers. Each stage of the SVM classifier and RBFNN classifier rejects the non-face regions and pass the face regions to the next stage in the cascade thereby efficiently tracking the face. The performance of tracking is evaluated using one hour video data. The performance of the cascaded SVM is compared with the cascaded RBFNN. The experiment results show that the proposed cascaded SVM classifier method gives better performance over the RBFNN and also the methods described in the literature using single SVM classifier [2]. While the face is being tracked, features are extracted from the mouth region for expression recognition. The features are modelled using a multi-class SVM. The SVM finds an optimal hyperplane to distinguish different facial expressions with an accuracy of 96.0%.

Online Adaptive Fast Multipose Face Tracking Based on Visual Cue Selection

This paper presents a system that is able to reliably track multiple faces under varying poses(tilted and rotated)in real time.The system consists of two interactive modules.The first module performs the detection of the face that is subject to rotation. The second module carries out online learning-based face tracking.A mechanism that switches between the two modules is embedded into the system to automatically decide the best strategy for reliable tracking.The mechanism enables a smooth transit between the detection and tracking modules when one of them gives either nil or unreliable results.Extensive experiments demonstrate that the system can reliably carry out real time tracking of multiple faces in a complex background under different conditions such as out-of-plane rotation,tilting,fast nonlinear motion,partial occlusion,large scale changes,and camera motion.Moreover,it runs at a high speed of 10～12 frames per second(fps)for an image of 320×240.

RFID Based e-quality Tracking in Service-oriented Manufacturing Execution System

The method of acquiring the real-time data has influenced the implementation of the manufacturing execution system （MES）. Accompanied with turning the MES into service-oriented manufacturing execution system （so-MES）, real-time e-quality tracking （e-QT）, in which real-time data are computed, has played more and more important roles in manufacturing. This paper presents an e-QT model through the study of real-time status data tracking and quality data collecting. An implementing architecture of the e-QT model is constructed on the basis of radio frequency identification devices （RFID） data-tracking network. In order to develop the e-QT system, some key enabling technologies, such as configuration, data collection, and data processing, etc, are studied. The relation schema between hardware is built for the RFID data-tracking network based on the configuration technique. Real-time data are sampled by using data collecting technique. Furthermore, real-time status and quality data in a shop-floor can be acquired in terms of using the real-time data computing method. Finally, a prototype system is developed and a running example is given so as to verify the feasibility of methods proposed in this paper. The proposed research provides effective e-quality tracking theoretical foundation through the use of RFID technology for the discrete manufacturing.

Current trends in three-dimensional visualization and real-time navigation as well as robot-assisted technologies in hepatobiliary surgery

With the continuous development of digital medicine,minimally invasive precision and safety have become the primary development trends in hepatobiliary surgery.Due to the specificity and complexity of hepatobiliary surgery,traditional preoperative imaging techniques such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging cannot meet the need for identification of fine anatomical regions.Imaging-based three-dimensional(3D)reconstruction,virtual simulation of surgery and 3D printing optimize the surgical plan through preoperative assessment,improving the controllability and safety of intraoperative operations,and in difficult-to-reach areas of the posterior and superior liver,assistive robots reproduce the surgeon’s natural movements with stable cameras,reducing natural vibrations.Electromagnetic navigation in abdominal surgery solves the problem of conventional surgery still relying on direct visual observation or preoperative image assessment.We summarize and compare these recent trends in digital medical solutions for the future development and refinement of digital medicine in hepatobiliary surgery.