Unfortunately, due to the current corona crisis, events all over the world are cancelled and traveling is almost impossible. This is also a shame for young researchers that can no longer present their research at conferences. Luckily, conference organizers have also found a way to continue online. Amogh Gudi and Marian Bittner, our PhD candidate researchers, have recently presented at two online AI conferences on two very interesting topics.

Webcam heart rate monitoring at ICT OPEN

ICT OPEN 2021 showcased the best and most exciting developments in ICT research in 70 presentations and 55 posters. It featured sessions on AI, big data, security and more. The work from Amogh Gudi, Marian Bittner, and Jan van Gemert focused on remote heart rate assessment from a camera. Assessing the variability in heart rate (which is an important predictor of stress) requires modeling the heartbeat with great precision. They showed that they could achieve this using an ordinary consumer-grade webcam and demonstrated higher HRV in higher arousal situations. This type of application can be useful for e-health applications, see for example our health innovation project. These heart rate assessments are now available in FaceReader.

Webcam gaze tracking at ECCV2020

The 16th European Conference on Computer Vision was a large 5-day event with presentations, live Q&As, posters, workshops on many topics within the computer vision field. Amogh presented very nice results on another interesting camera-based application to find out where on the screen people are focusing their gaze. Usually, this is done with expensive external hardware devices. However, with deep convolutional neural networks, camera images can be used to estimate 3D vectors of eye gaze. They presented different calibration methods that can ultimately help match the gaze vector with an actual location on the screen. We will integrate these results in the FaceReader SDK and FaceReader Online, as part of the EyeReader project.

Pros and Cons of online conferences

Although it is great that these events are still possible, it is a shame that you miss some of the direct interactions with other researchers. Especially, in a more social environment. Hopefully, that will again be possible soon. One benefit of online conferences is that you can easily watch talks from experts all over the world. It is also very easy to record the talk and watch them later; indeed we can still share Amogh his talks from the online conferences in this post. So even if you not usually visit these type of conferences, you can have a more in-depth look at these interesting topics.