Contact Area Detector using Cross View Projection Consistency for COVID-19 Projects

The ability to determine what parts of objects and surfaces people touch as they go about their daily lives would be useful in understanding how the COVID-19 virus spreads. To determine whether a person has touched an object or surface using visual data, images, or videos, is a hard problem. Computer vision 3D reconstruction approaches project objects and the human body from the 2D image domain to 3D and perform 3D space intersection directly. However, this solution would not meet the accuracy requirement in applications due to projection error. Another standard approach is to train a neural network to infer touch actions from the collected visual data. This strategy would require significant amounts of training data to generalize over scale and viewpoint variations. A different approach to this problem is to identify whether a person has touched a defined object. In this work, we show that the solution to this problem can be straightforward. Specifically, we show that the contact between an object and a static surface can be identified by projecting the object onto the static surface through two different viewpoints and analyzing their 2D intersection. The object contacts the surface when the projected points are close to each other; we call this cross view projection consistency. Instead of doing 3D scene reconstruction or transfer learning from deep networks, a mapping from the surface in the two camera views to the surface space is the only requirement. For planar space, this mapping is the Homography transformation. This simple method can be easily adapted to real-life applications. In this paper, we apply our method to do office occupancy detection for studying the COVID-19 transmission pattern from an office desk in a meeting room using the contact information.