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Human movement intention recognition is important for human-robot interaction. Existing work based on motor imagery electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a non-invasive and portable solution for intention detection. However, the data-driven methods may suffer from the limited scale and diversity of the training datasets, which result in poor generalization performance on new test subjects. It is practically difficult to directly aggregate data from multiple datasets for training, since they often employ different channels and collected data suffers from significant domain shifts caused by different devices, experiment setup, etc. On the other hand, the inter-subject heterogeneity is also substantial due to individual differences in EEG representations. In this work, we developed two networks to learn from both the shared and the complete channels across datasets, handling inter-subject and inter-dataset heterogeneity respectively. Based on both networks, we further developed an online knowledge co-distillation framework to collaboratively learn from both networks, achieving coherent performance boosts. Experimental results have shown that our proposed method can effectively aggregate knowledge from multiple datasets, demonstrating better generalization in the context of cross-subject validation.

Egocentric vision is an emerging topic, which has demonstrated great potential in assistive healthcare scenarios, ranging from human-centric behavior analysis to personal social assistance. Within this field, due to the heterogeneity of visual perception from first-person views, egocentric pose estimation is one of the most significant prerequisites for enabling various downstream applications. However, existing methods for egocentric pose estimation mainly focus on predicting the pose represented in the camera coordinates from a single image, which ignores the latent cues in the temporal domain and results in less accuracy. In this paper, we propose Ego+X, an egocentric vision based system for 3D canonical pose estimation and human-centric social interaction characterization. Our system is composed of two head-mounted egocentric cameras, where one is faced downwards and the other looks outwards. By leveraging the global context provided by visual SLAM, we first propose Ego-Glo for spatial-accurate and temporal-consistent egocentric 3D pose estimation in the canonical coordinate system. With the help of an egocentric camera looking outwards, we then propose Ego-Soc by extending Ego-Glo to various social interaction tasks, e.g., object detection and human-human interaction. Quantitative and qualitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Ego+X.

The success of most advanced facial expression recognition works relies heavily on large-scale annotated datasets. However, it poses great challenges in acquiring clean and consistent annotations for facial expression datasets. On the other hand, self-supervised contrastive learning has gained great popularity due to its simple yet effective instance discrimination training strategy, which can potentially circumvent the annotation issue. Nevertheless, there remain inherent disadvantages of instance-level discrimination, which are even more challenging when faced with complicated facial representations. In this paper, we revisit the use of self-supervised contrastive learning and explore three core strategies to enforce expression-specific representations and to minimize the interference from other facial attributes, such as identity and face styling. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods, in terms of both categorical and dimensional facial expression recognition tasks. Our project page: https://claudiashu.github.io/SSLFER.

Vision-based 3D human pose estimation and shape reconstruction play important roles in robot-assisted healthcare monitoring and personal assistance. However, 3D data captured from a single viewpoint always encounter occlusions and exhibit substantial heterogeneity across different views, resulting in significant challenges for both tasks. Extensive approaches have been proposed to perform each task separately, but few of them present a unified solution. In this paper, we propose a novel network based on signed distance functions, namely PoseSDF, to simultaneously reconstruct 3D lower limb shape and estimate gait pose by two dedicated branches. To promote multi-task learning, several strategies are developed to ensure that these two branches leverage the same latent shape code while exchanging information between them. More importantly, an auxiliary RotNet is incorporated into the inference phase, overcoming the inherent limitations of implicit neural functions under cross-view scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed PoseSDF can achieve both high-quality shape reconstruction and precise pose estimation, generalizing well on the data from novel views, gait patterns, as well as real-world.

With the increasing awareness of high-quality life, there is a growing need for health monitoring devices running robust algorithms in home environment. Health monitoring technologies enable real-time analysis of users’ health status, offering long-term healthcare support and reducing hospitalization time. The propose of this work is twofold, the software focuses on the analysis of gait, which is widely adopted for joint correction and assessing any lower limb, or spinal problem. On the hardware side, a novel marker-less gait analysis device using a low-cost RGB camera mounted on a mobile tele-robot is designed. As gait analysis with a single camera is much more challenging compared to previous works utilizing multi-cameras, a RGB-D camera or wearable sensors, we propose using vision-based human pose estimation approaches. More specifically, based on the out-put of state-of-the-art human pose estimation models, we devise measurements for four bespoke gait parameters: inversion/eversion, dorsiflexion/plantarflexion, ankle and foot progression angles. We thereby classify walking patterns into normal, supination, pronation and limp. We also illustrate how to run the proposed machine learning models in low-resource environments such as a single entry-level CPU. Experiments show that our single RGB camera method achieves competitive performance compared to multi-camera motion capture systems, at smaller hardware costs.

Acquisition of bimanual motor skills, critical in several applications ranging from robotic teleoperations to surgery, is associated with a protracted learning curve. Brain connectivity based on functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) data has shown promising results in distinguishing experts from novice surgeons. However, it is less well understood how expertise-related disparity in brain connectivity is modulated by dynamic temporal demands experienced during a surgical task. In this study, we use fNIRS to examine the interplay between frontal and motor brain regions in a cohort of surgical residents of varying expertise performing a laparoscopic surgical task under temporal demand. The results demonstrate that prefrontal-motor connectivity in senior residents is more resilient to time pressure. Furthermore, certain global characteristics of brain connectomes, such as the small-world index, may be used to detect the presence of an underlying stressor.

Robot-assisted endobronchial intervention requires accurate localisation based on both intra- and pre-operative data. Most existing methods achieve this by registering 2D videos with 3D CT models according to a defined similarity metric with local features. Instead, we formulate the bronchoscopic localisation as a learning-based global localisation using deep neural networks. The proposed network consists of two generative architectures and one auxiliary learning component. The cycle generative architecture bridges the domain variance between the real bronchoscopic videos and virtual views derived from pre-operative CT data so that the proposed approach can be trained through a large number of generated virtual images but deployed through real images. The auxiliary learning architecture leverages complementary relative pose regression to constrain the search space, ensuring consistent global pose predictions. Most importantly, the uncertainty of each global pose is obtained through variational inference by sampling within the learned underlying probability distribution. Detailed validation results demonstrate the localisation accuracy with reasonable uncertainty achieved and its potential clinical value.