Personalizing vision-based gestural interfaces for HRI with UAVs: a transfer learning approach

Following recent works on HRI for UAVs, we present a gesture recognition system which operates on the video stream recorded from a passive monocular camera installed on a quadcopter. While many challenges must be addressed for building a real-time vision-based gestural interface, in this paper we specifically focus on the problem of user personalization. Different users tend to perform the same gesture with different styles and speed. Thus, a system trained on visual sequences depicting some users may work poorly when data from other people are available. On the other hand, collecting and annotating many user-specific data is time consuming. To avoid these issues, in this paper we propose a personalized gestural interface. We introduce a novel transfer learning algorithm which, exploiting both data downloaded from the web and gestures collected from other users, permits to learn a set of person-specific classifiers. We integrate the proposed gesture recognition module into a HRI system with a flying quadrotor robot. In our system first the UAV localizes a person and individuates her identity. Then, when a user performs a specific gesture, the system recognizes it adopting the associated user-specific classifier and the quadcopter executes the corresponding task. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed personalized gesture recognition solution is advantageous with respect to generic ones.