Hands-Free VR

The paper introduces Hands-Free VR, a voice-based natural-language interface for VR. The user gives a command using their voice, the speech audio data is converted to text using a speech-to-text deep learning model that is fine-tuned for robustness to word phonetic similarity and to spoken English accents, and the text is mapped to an executable VR command using a large language model that is robust to natural language diversity. Hands-Free VR was evaluated in a controlled within-subjects study (N = 22) that asked participants to find specific objects and to place them in various configurations. In the control condition participants used a conventional VR user interface to grab, carry, and position the objects using the handheld controllers. In the experimental condition participants used Hands-Free VR. The results confirm that: (1) Hands-Free VR is robust to spoken English accents, as for 20 of our participants English was not their first language, and to word phonetic similarity, correctly transcribing the voice command 96.71% of the time; (2) Hands-Free VR is robust to natural language diversity, correctly mapping the transcribed command to an executable command in 97.83% of the time; (3) Hands-Free VR had a significant efficiency advantage over the conventional VR interface in terms of task completion time, total viewpoint translation, total view direction rotation, and total left and right hand translations; (4) Hands-Free VR received high user preference ratings in terms of ease of use, intuitiveness, ergonomics, reliability, and desirability.

SnakeVoxFormer: Transformer-based Single Image\\Voxel Reconstruction with Run Length Encoding

Deep learning-based 3D object reconstruction has achieved unprecedented results. Among those, the transformer deep neural model showed outstanding performance in many applications of computer vision. We introduce SnakeVoxFormer, a novel, 3D object reconstruction in voxel space from a single image using the transformer. The input to SnakeVoxFormer is a 2D image, and the result is a 3D voxel model. The key novelty of our approach is in using the run-length encoding that traverses (like a snake) the voxel space and encodes wide spatial differences into a 1D structure that is suitable for transformer encoding. We then use dictionary encoding to convert the discovered RLE blocks into tokens that are used for the transformer. The 1D representation is a lossless 3D shape data compression method that converts to 1D data that use only about 1% of the original data size. We show how different voxel traversing strategies affect the effect of encoding and reconstruction. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art for 3D voxel reconstruction from images and our method improves the state-of-the-art methods by at least 2.8% and up to 19.8%.

Covfefe: A Computer Vision Approach For Estimating Force Exertion

Cumulative exposure to repetitive and forceful activities may lead to musculoskeletal injuries which not only reduce workers' efficiency and productivity, but also affect their quality of life. Thus, widely accessible techniques for reliable detection of unsafe muscle force exertion levels for human activity is necessary for their well-being. However, measurement of force exertion levels is challenging and the existing techniques pose a great challenge as they are either intrusive, interfere with human-machine interface, and/or subjective in the nature, thus are not scalable for all workers. In this work, we use face videos and the photoplethysmography (PPG) signals to classify force exertion levels of 0\%, 50\%, and 100\% (representing rest, moderate effort, and high effort), thus providing a non-intrusive and scalable approach. Efficient feature extraction approaches have been investigated, including standard deviation of the movement of different landmarks of the face, distances between peaks and troughs in the PPG signals. We note that the PPG signals can be obtained from the face videos, thus giving an efficient classification algorithm for the force exertion levels using face videos. Based on the data collected from 20 subjects, features extracted from the face videos give 90\% accuracy in classification among the 100\% and the combination of 0\% and 50\% datasets. Further combining the PPG signals provide 81.7\% accuracy. The approach is also shown to be robust to the correctly identify force level when the person is talking, even though such datasets are not included in the training.