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Soon, robots with human gaze |
| on 12-10-2007 12:30 |
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LONDON:
French researchers have developed virtual characters that meet a person's gaze
just like another human. The software allows the characters to look at scenes
and people the way humans do.
Scientists say the goal is to
make virtual humans and perhaps humanoid robots easier to relate to.
The software developed by
Gérard Bailly and colleagues in the GIPSA Lab at the Institut National
Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, mimics human gaze patterns.
Their characters are capable
of saccades – the unconscious jerks which constantly makes our eyes dart
around – tracking moving objects like humans, and fixing their gaze on the
same features as humans for similar
periods.
The scientists say the
new software is based on a pioneering model devised in 2003 by Laurent Itti and
others at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, US, to mimic human
vision.
According to the
New
Scientist
magazine, the model deals with
scenes in three ways: looking for 'saliency' or the most visually outstanding
parts in a scene, 'pertinence' or the most important parts, and 'attention',
which temporarily inhibits regions that are no longer
interesting.
Bailly's team,
however, added several extra mechanisms; an 'attention stack' that tries to
better mimic the way humans rank interesting areas, while another module that
recognises certain familiar objects, such as faces.
These allow the software to
focus a character's eyes on particular scene details at relevant times, like the
eyes and mouth on a face when communicating, for
example.
The team made a third
addition to Itti's model, as well, a 'retinal filter' that simulates the
difference between peripheral vision and the high-resolution information
gathered by the centre of the
retina.
Bailly said the team
has already tested their model in face-to-face trials where people interacted
with a humanoid using the software.
"We found that the robot's
gaze patterns were comparable to the ones recorded on human subjects observing
the same scene," said
Bailly.
He said the new
attention model would be crucial for giving virtual characters human-like
movements and good social skills. It would also help them act human because, by
using the same vision strategy as a human, they will gather the same information
a human person would from a scene, Bailly added.
"These agents should be able
to analyse the scene they're they are interacting with," said
Bailly.
"This research is
important because it focuses on adding a social aspect [to characters]," added
Christopher Peters of the University of Paris VIII, who has researched similar
problems.
"But it also raises
difficult questions and challenges -- such as how to model competition for
visual attention between different stimuli, like multiple faces and conflicting
emotions," Peters added.
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