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Vassilis C. Nicodemou

Publications and source records attributed to Vassilis C. Nicodemou.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Combining Facial Videos and Biosignals for Stress Estimation During Driving

Reliable stress recognition is critical in applications such as medical monitoring and safety-critical systems, including real-world driving. While stress is commonly detected using physiological signals such as perinasal perspiration and heart rate, facial activity provides complementary cues that can be captured unobtrusively from video. We propose a multimodal stress estimation framework that combines facial videos and physiological signals, remaining effective even when biosignal acquisition is challenging. Facial behavior is represented using a dense 3D Morphable Model, yielding a 56-dimensional descriptor that captures subtle expression and head-pose dynamics over time. To study how stress modulates facial motion, we perform extensive experiments alongside established physiological markers. Paired hypothesis tests between baseline and stressor phases show that 38 of 56 facial components exhibit consistent, phase-specific stress responses comparable to physiological markers. Building on these findings, we introduce a Transformer-based temporal modeling framework and evaluate unimodal, early-fusion, and cross-modal attention strategies. Cross-modal attention fusion of 3D-derived facial features with physiological signals substantially improves performance over physiological signals alone, increasing AUROC from 52.7% and accuracy from 51.0% to 92.0% and 86.7%, respectively. Although evaluated on driving data, the proposed framework and protocol may generalize to other stress estimation settings.

cs.CV↗

Learning to Infer the Depth Map of a Hand from its Color Image

We propose the first approach to the problem of inferring the depth map of a human hand based on a single RGB image. We achieve this with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that employs a stacked hourglass model as its main building block. Intermediate supervision is used in several outputs of the proposed architecture in a staged approach. To aid the process of training and inference, hand segmentation masks are also estimated in such an intermediate supervision step, and used to guide the subsequent depth estimation process. In order to train and evaluate the proposed method we compile and make publicly available HandRGBD, a new dataset of 20,601 views of hands, each consisting of an RGB image and an aligned depth map. Based on HandRGBD, we explore variants of the proposed approach in an ablative study and determine the best performing one. The results of an extensive experimental evaluation demonstrate that hand depth estimation from a single RGB frame can be achieved with an accuracy of 22mm, which is comparable to the accuracy achieved by contemporary low-cost depth cameras. Such a 3D reconstruction of hands based on RGB information is valuable as a final result on its own right, but also as an input to several other hand analysis and perception algorithms that require depth input. Essentially, in such a context, the proposed approach bridges the gap between RGB and RGBD, by making all existing RGBD-based methods applicable to RGB input.

cs.CV↗