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Overview

Watson is a real-time visual feedback recognition library for interactive interfaces that can recognize head gaze, head gestures, eye gaze and eye gestures using the images of a monocular or stereo camera. It can be easily installed on a Microsoft Windows system using the installation package. After installation follow the instructions below to configure Watson for your camera.

Users

Launching

You can start Watson from the toolkit Launcher (work in progress). By default, Watson for the toolkit is configured to work with USB camera using VFW (Video for Windows) driver. If using a different camera or dirver change the camera type parameter accordingly. See the developer section below for details.

Developers

Configuring

In order to use Watson with the rest of the Virtual Human toolkit, a few parameters need to be set in the ParamWatsonUser.cfg found in WATSON_DIR\Sequences\saso\ where WATSON_DIR is the directory where Watson is installed.

Changing the camera type

By default, Watson for the toolkit is configured to work with USB camera using VFW (Video for Windows) driver. If using a different camera or dirver change the camera type parameter accordingly.

SECTION_SEQUENCE

CAMERA_TYPE: USB_VFW

CAMERA_TYPE is USB_DIRECTX for DirectX driver or DRAGONFLY for Point Grey DragonFly camera. If using Stereo Camera, please see the section on 'Configuration for Stereo Camera'.

Configuration for Stereo Camera

In order to use Watson with the toolkit using Stero camera, use the 'Watson-Stereo Camera' shortcut created during installation. The 'Start In' or' Wroking Directory' for stereo camera is set to be WATSON_DIR\Sequences\SRI. However, the configuration file 'ParamWatsonUser.cfg' in this directory is not configured to work with the rest of the toolkit by default. The section to set up Active MQ messaging needs to be added to the ParamWatsonUser.cfg so Watson can send messages and work with the rest of the toolkit. See the 'Setting up ActiveMQ messaging' sections for activating ActiveMQ messaging for Stereo Camera set up.

Setting up ActiveMQ messaging

Note: If using the WATSON_DIR\Sequences\saso\ configuration for VH toolkit, this section should already be set up in the configuration file. If using other Watson configuration (such as WATSON_DIR\Sequences\SRI for stereo camera, add this section to the ParamWatsonUser.cfg file

To activate ActiveMQ the following section is added:

SECTION_NETWORK

CONNECT_ACTIVEMQ: TRUE

TYPE_INFO_SENT_ACTIVEMQ: INFO_HEAD_NODS INFO_FACING_OBJECT END

This activates ActiveMQ messaging and will start sending messages related to head nod and facing. The facing message tells which object (or character) you are facing.

Setting up Regions of Interest

The commands related to facing are deifined so that a region in 3D space is created and associated to a caption. To create the region of interest (ROI), imagine a plane parallel to the image plane of the camera.
Eg: In case of a webcam in a laptop, the computer screen is already parallel with the camera. The camera is the referential(0,0,0). When looking at the camera, the X axis goes (positive) to the right. The Y axis goes (positive) up.

Regions of Interest on the screen can be associated by adding the appropriate caption and coordinates as shown in the example below. The example assumes that we are creating two Regions of Interest with captions "doctor" and "elder" and shows how to associate coordinates to these captions to created ROIs.

A "doctor" region can be associated to the right part of the screen by adding these two commands at the end of ParamWatsonUser.cfg (after the section statement):

OBJECT1_CAPTION: doctor

OBJECT1_ROI: 0 -1000 1000 1000

The Roi parameter are: offset_x offset_y width height. Everything is in millimeter.

Similarly an "elder" region can be set up on the left side of the screen with:

OBJECT2_CAPTION: elder

OBJECT2_ROI: -1000 -1000 1000 1000

To debug the object region of interest, the following options can be added to the TYPE_INFO_SENT_ACTIVEMQ parameter

TYPE_INFO_SENT_ACTIVEMQ: INFO_SCREEN_COORDS INFO_HEAD_NOD INFO_FACING_OBJECT END

This will send a new massage at every frame with the projections of the head gaze on the screen (in millimeter).

Message API

Sends

  • vrVision

Receives

Known Issues

Watson needs certain configuration files during start up. Hence the 'Working Directory' or 'Start in' directory needs to be set to the correct one before launching Watson. For the VH toolkit this directory is the WATSON_DIR\Sequences\saso\ directory where WATSON_DIR is the directory where Watson is installed.

  • In order to use Watson with the toolkit, right click on any of the shortcuts based on your camera type created during installation on the desktop and open "Properties".
  • Change the "Start In" folder to use WATSON_DIR\Sequences\saso\ and click OK. By default, Watson for VH is configured to work with USB camera using VFW (Video for Windows) driver. If using a different camera or dirver , see the 'Changing the camera type' section to change the camera or driver type.
  • When Watson is run from this shortcut, it should be configured to work smoothly with the rest of the VH toolkit.

FAQ

FAQ

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