Egocentric-View Fingertip Detection for Air Writing Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Next Generation Computing and Communication Hub for First Responders in Smart Cities

This paper contributes to the development of a Next Generation First Responder (NGFR) communication platform with the key goal of embedding it into a smart city technology infrastructure. The framework of this approach is a concept known as SmartHub, developed by the US Department of Homeland Security. The proposed embedding methodology complies with the standard categories and indicators of smart city performance. This paper offers two practice-centered extensions of the NGFR hub, which are also the main results: first, a cognitive workload monitoring of first responders as a basis for their performance assessment, monitoring, and improvement; and second, a highly sensitive problem of human society, the emergency assistance tools for individuals with disabilities. Both extensions explore various technological-societal dimensions of smart cities, including interoperability, standardization, and accessibility to assistive technologies for people with disabilities. Regarding cognitive workload monitoring, the core result is a novel AI formalism, an ensemble of machine learning processes aggregated using machine reasoning. This ensemble enables predictive situation assessment and self-aware computing, which is the basis of the digital twin concept. We experimentally demonstrate a specific component of a digital twin of an NGFR, a near-real-time monitoring of the NGFR cognitive workload. Regarding our second result, a problem of emergency assistance for individuals with disabilities that originated as accessibility to assistive technologies to promote disability inclusion, we provide the NGFR specification focusing on interactions based on AI formalism and using a unified hub platform. This paper also discusses a technology roadmap using the notion of the Emergency Management Cycle (EMC), a commonly accepted doctrine for managing disasters through the steps of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. It positions the NGFR hub as a benchmark of the smart city emergency service.

Deep Learning Based Air-Writing Recognition with the Choice of Proper Interpolation Technique

The act of writing letters or words in free space with body movements is known as air-writing. Air-writing recognition is a special case of gesture recognition in which gestures correspond to characters and digits written in the air. Air-writing, unlike general gestures, does not require the memorization of predefined special gesture patterns. Rather, it is sensitive to the subject and language of interest. Traditional air-writing requires an extra device containing sensor(s), while the wide adoption of smart-bands eliminates the requirement of the extra device. Therefore, air-writing recognition systems are becoming more flexible day by day. However, the variability of signal duration is a key problem in developing an air-writing recognition model. Inconsistent signal duration is obvious due to the nature of the writing and data-recording process. To make the signals consistent in length, researchers attempted various strategies including padding and truncating, but these procedures result in significant data loss. Interpolation is a statistical technique that can be employed for time-series signals to ensure minimum data loss. In this paper, we extensively investigated different interpolation techniques on seven publicly available air-writing datasets and developed a method to recognize air-written characters using a 2D-CNN model. In both user-dependent and user-independent principles, our method outperformed all the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin for all datasets.