Face Detection Through Interactive Sketching in Virtual Reality

Face Detection Through Interactive Sketching in Virtual Reality (2005)

Macquarie University Safety Net Grant

Investigators: Kavakli, M

The project describes a novel user interface in which a designer defines the contour of a sketch by controlling a pointer using a pair of data gloves in 3D space. Both the data gloves and the pointer incorporate 3D position sensors so that drawing primitives entered are recreated in real time on a head mounted display worn by the user. Thus, the VR system provides a "3D sketch pad" and the designer has the benefit of a stereo image. We have already done some ground work within this area.

One of my Honours students completed his thesis on the development of a VR interface for hand-gesture recognition in 2005. A PhD student of mine has worked on Face Recognition and Cognitive Modelling for a year. I have produced 4 IEEE papers this year with these students, addressing our research results. In this project, used a VR software (EON Reality Immersive) to integrate a 3D Modelling package (Softimage), data gloves and a head mounted display within a VR Interface and test the usability and efficiency of the interface with a set of pilot experiments. In the experiments, we used one type of datagloves (5DT Datagloves 5).

I established contacts with NSW Police Headquarters and they were interested in collaborating with us to test the VR interface for the face detection of criminals in a Police database. The core question that we answered in this one year Safety Net project was very specific to the VR hardware as follows: "How can we support the face detection process using VR and gesture recognition technology?"

The proposed VR system provides the user with the ability of using his/her hands as dynamic input devices for interactive 3D sketching within virtual reality (VR). The main objective of this scaled down project is to complete the development of the conceptual model with the feedback from a set of pilot experiments. Rather than focusing on developing a general purpose VR system.