Showroom

The "Showroom" concept is an interactive showroom which aims to highlight and illustrate the results that emerge from Idiap's research. This "Technology Showcase" is a tool used for public communication. It focuses on the different institute's visitors such as researchers, industrialists and students. This room is interactive which means it includes touch screens with mini-film presentation, demonstrators (using technologies such as speech processing, biometric authentication, object recognition, etc.).

IDEA

The IDEA demo combines speech processing and computer vision algorithms to build a live 3D representation of the showroom, representing each visitor as an animated avatar.

As visitors walk in the environment, they can watch their avatar moving accordingly on a dedicated screen. The mouth of each avatar is animated when the corresponding person speaks.

Different visualizations are proposed to explain the mechanism of the algorithms in an interactive manner.

Setup

The speaker localization and people tracking steps are performed in real time on the following hardware:

• 1 (home-made) microphone array with 8 microphones,
• 4 firewire cameras running at 7.5 fps,
• 1 MacPro 2.8GHz Quad-core.

The people tracking implementation is based on the Probability Occupancy Map (POM) algorithm for people detection.