arXiv subjects

Andreas Bulling

Publications and source records attributed to Andreas Bulling.

98 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Labeled pupils in the wild: A dataset for studying pupil detection in unconstrained environments

We present labelled pupils in the wild (LPW), a novel dataset of 66 high-quality, high-speed eye region videos for the development and evaluation of pupil detection algorithms. The videos in our dataset were recorded from 22 participants in everyday locations at about 95 FPS using a state-of-the-art dark-pupil head-mounted eye tracker. They cover people with different ethnicities, a diverse set of everyday indoor and outdoor illumination environments, as well as natural gaze direction distributions. The dataset also includes participants wearing glasses, contact lenses, as well as make-up. We benchmark five state-of-the-art pupil detection algorithms on our dataset with respect to robustness and accuracy. We further study the influence of image resolution, vision aids, as well as recording location (indoor, outdoor) on pupil detection performance. Our evaluations provide valuable insights into the general pupil detection problem and allow us to identify key challenges for robust pupil detection on head-mounted eye trackers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

The revised Brussels-Locarno Sunspot Number (1981-2015)

In 1981, the production of the international Sunspot Number moved from the Zürich Observatory to the Royal Observatory of Belgium, marking a very important transition in the history of the Sunspot Number. Those recent decades are particularly important for linking recent modern solar indices and fluxes and the past Sunspot Number series. However, large variations have been recently identified in the scale of the Sunspot Number between 1981 and the present. Here, we reconstruct a new average Sunspot Number series $S_N$ using long-duration stations between 1981 and 2015. We also extend this reconstruction using long-time series from 35 stations over 1945-2015, which includes the 1981 transition. In both reconstructions, we also derive a parallel Group Number series $G_N$. Our results confirm the variable trends of the Locarno pilot station. We also verify the scale of the resulting 1981-2015 correction factor relative to the preceding period 1945--1980. By comparing the new $S_N$ and $G_N$ series, we find that a constant quadratic relation exists between those two indices. This proxy relation leads to a fully constant and cycle-independent $S_N/G_N$ ratio over cycles 19 to 23, with the exception of cycle 24. We find a very good agreement between our reconstructed $G_N$ and the new "backbone" Group Number but inhomogeneities in the original Group Number as well as the $F_{10.7}$ radio flux and the American sunspot number $R_a$. This analysis opens the way to the implementation of a more advanced method for producing the Sunspot Number in the future. In particular, we identify the existence of distinct subsets of observing stations sharing very similar personal k factors, which may be a key element for building a future multi-station reference in place of the past single pilot station.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2015

GazeDPM: Early Integration of Gaze Information in Deformable Part Models

An increasing number of works explore collaborative human-computer systems in which human gaze is used to enhance computer vision systems. For object detection these efforts were so far restricted to late integration approaches that have inherent limitations, such as increased precision without increase in recall. We propose an early integration approach in a deformable part model, which constitutes a joint formulation over gaze and visual data. We show that our GazeDPM method improves over the state-of-the-art DPM baseline by 4% and a recent method for gaze-supported object detection by 3% on the public POET dataset. Our approach additionally provides introspection of the learnt models, can reveal salient image structures, and allows us to investigate the interplay between gaze attracting and repelling areas, the importance of view-specific models, as well as viewers' personal biases in gaze patterns. We finally study important practical aspects of our approach, such as the impact of using saliency maps instead of real fixations, the impact of the number of fixations, as well as robustness to gaze estimation error.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Rendering of Eyes for Eye-Shape Registration and Gaze Estimation

Images of the eye are key in several computer vision problems, such as shape registration and gaze estimation. Recent large-scale supervised methods for these problems require time-consuming data collection and manual annotation, which can be unreliable. We propose synthesizing perfectly labelled photo-realistic training data in a fraction of the time. We used computer graphics techniques to build a collection of dynamic eye-region models from head scan geometry. These were randomly posed to synthesize close-up eye images for a wide range of head poses, gaze directions, and illumination conditions. We used our model's controllability to verify the importance of realistic illumination and shape variations in eye-region training data. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of our synthesized training data (SynthesEyes) by out-performing state-of-the-art methods for eye-shape registration as well as cross-dataset appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Prediction of Search Targets From Fixations in Open-World Settings

Previous work on predicting the target of visual search from human fixations only considered closed-world settings in which training labels are available and predictions are performed for a known set of potential targets. In this work we go beyond the state of the art by studying search target prediction in an open-world setting in which we no longer assume that we have fixation data to train for the search targets. We present a dataset containing fixation data of 18 users searching for natural images from three image categories within synthesised image collages of about 80 images. In a closed-world baseline experiment we show that we can predict the correct target image out of a candidate set of five images. We then present a new problem formulation for search target prediction in the open-world setting that is based on learning compatibilities between fixations and potential targets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation in the Wild

Appearance-based gaze estimation is believed to work well in real-world settings, but existing datasets have been collected under controlled laboratory conditions and methods have been not evaluated across multiple datasets. In this work we study appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild. We present the MPIIGaze dataset that contains 213,659 images we collected from 15 participants during natural everyday laptop use over more than three months. Our dataset is significantly more variable than existing ones with respect to appearance and illumination. We also present a method for in-the-wild appearance-based gaze estimation using multimodal convolutional neural networks that significantly outperforms state-of-the art methods in the most challenging cross-dataset evaluation. We present an extensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art image-based gaze estimation algorithms on three current datasets, including our own. This evaluation provides clear insights and allows us to identify key research challenges of gaze estimation in the wild.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2014

Ubic: Bridging the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world

Advances in computing technology increasingly blur the boundary between the digital domain and the physical world. Although the research community has developed a large number of cryptographic primitives and has demonstrated their usability in all-digital communication, many of them have not yet made their way into the real world due to usability aspects. We aim to make another step towards a tighter integration of digital cryptography into real world interactions. We describe Ubic, a framework that allows users to bridge the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world. Ubic relies on head-mounted displays, like Google Glass, resource-friendly computer vision techniques as well as mathematically sound cryptographic primitives to provide users with better security and privacy guarantees. The framework covers key cryptographic primitives, such as secure identification, document verification using a novel secure physical document format, as well as content hiding. To make a contribution of practical value, we focused on making Ubic as simple, easily deployable, and user friendly as possible.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2014

Pupil: An Open Source Platform for Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Gaze-based Interaction

Commercial head-mounted eye trackers provide useful features to customers in industry and research but are expensive and rely on closed source hardware and software. This limits the application areas and use of mobile eye tracking to expert users and inhibits user-driven development, customisation, and extension. In this paper we present Pupil -- an accessible, affordable, and extensible open source platform for mobile eye tracking and gaze-based interaction. Pupil comprises 1) a light-weight headset with high-resolution cameras, 2) an open source software framework for mobile eye tracking, as well as 3) a graphical user interface (GUI) to playback and visualize video and gaze data. Pupil features high-resolution scene and eye cameras for monocular and binocular gaze estimation. The software and GUI are platform-independent and include state-of-the-art algorithms for real-time pupil detection and tracking, calibration, and accurate gaze estimation. Results of a performance evaluation show that Pupil can provide an average gaze estimation accuracy of 0.6 degree of visual angle (0.08 degree precision) with a latency of the processing pipeline of only 0.045 seconds.

cs.CV↗