Visiting Speaker Jossekin Beilharz
Object identification and Pose Recognition on a Pressure-Sensitive Multi-Touch Floor.

Date: Tuesday 21st Feburary 2012
Time: 13:15 – 14:00
Place: Digital Arts Convent Building, opposite Wits School of the Arts

” We propose a new approach to tracking users, objects, and activities in a smart room. Unlike traditional approaches that point cameras into the 3D volume of a room, we provide all horizontal surfaces with touch sensitivity, including chairs, tables, and the floor. Gravity pushes people and objects against these surfaces, causing them to leave imprints, i.e., pressure distributions across the surface. We demonstrate how to decompose these imprints into the object and pose that caused them. The particular “perspective” reduces occlusion issues faced by regular and depth cameras. It also limits the freedom of objects from rotation and translation in 3D to rotation and translation on a plane, which allows us to recognize objects using simpler and potentially more reliable matching algorithms. We present our 8m2  floor installation, a set of active and a set of passive touch-sensitive furniture, as well as the algorithms we created for recognizing objects and poses.”

About Jossekin Beilharz:
Currently working at SAP Research, Pretoria and a member of House4Hack, Centurion. A masters student of IT-Systems Engineering at Hasso-Platter-Institute at the University of Potsdam. He worked on gravitySpace with Prof. Patrick Baudisch, chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at HPI in 2010-2011 and initiated a Random Hacks of Kindness event in Pretoria.