Nouse Interfaces: Perceptual Vision Technology of IIT-ITI NRC-CNRC

NRC-IIT - Institute for Information Technology Nouse™ (Nose as Mouse) Interfaces

Downloads

Public notice:

Since 2001, when the first perceptual vision technology prototype named Nouse was developed, we have received over half a thousand of emails from all of the globe, from people of very different backgrounds, questions and proposals: students, artists, people with special needs, journalists, military and government organizations, private and business sectors, rehabilitation and entertainment institutions. We do our best to provide everybody with needed answers and for some also with needed technology licenses.

At the same time, since when this website was launched, the perceptual vision technology has been considerably diversified and enhanced by the efforts of our group. For faster dissemination of the scientific results and to promote faster development of this, so much needed in many aspects of our life, technology, we do our best to keep our publication page up to date. Unfortunately, it becomes very difficult for us to update and maintain our downloadables, which is partially also due to the government non-disclosure regulations. Because of that some of our demos may not be presently available.
Sorry for inconvenience and best regards.

Dmitry Gorodnichy, Project leader.

These demonstration programs are for Educational and Evaluation purposes only.
They are provided for free. However, please make sure that you have read and understood
the Demonstration Software Licence before downloading these programs.

Please also note the demonstration programs do not provide you full functionality. - They are only meant to show you the technological breakthrough in face tracking.

We are however presently developing a completely hands-free version of a vision-based user interface system called Perceptual Vision Interface Nouse™ (PVI Nouse™).
This system will include such features as
1. Hands-free user-camera calibration and automatic tracking-control parameters (to adjust to different levels of head mobility and facial expression generation)
2. Automatic user memorization and recognition (so that proper user settings are set)
3. Nose motion-operated letter typing and key entry
4. Intelligent switching from one nose-operated pointing control mode to another
5. Fully integrated in MS Windows (running in sleep mode in background until you activated with face motion or switch)

You will only need a webcam installed on your computer to run these demos.

Requirements:
- Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.
- USB or FireWire camera.
- The following DLL files:
Msvcrtd.dll (Microsoft DirectX DirectShow Library), CV.dll, cvaux.dll (Intel OpenCV Library), ipl.dll, iplx.dll (Intel Image Processing Library), pvsaux.dll (PVS library).
You can download them either from their distributors websites or directly from here.
Otherwise, you can download and unzip this file: pvs-dlls.zip (1.7 Mb) into the directory from which you will be running Nouse.

1. Nouse™ basic (user-end programs)

	Download: NouseSetup.exe (5.5Mb) // Version 2.0. Released: June 2003. Good for evaluating the potential of the technology. // NB: This program should be launched (and closed) prior to running all other Nouse-operated programs, NousePaint, BubbleFrenzy, in order for the Nouse to be initialized. See ReadMe file. NB: TYPO NOTICED! In this version, when calibrating Nouse (by pushing the "Zero Reset" button when running Nouse.exe), you have to simply click with your mouse on the tip of the nose, RATHER THAN put the nose in the middle of the screen, as instructed by the program. Features mentioned in our papers): + Motion/Skin detection: automatically switches Nouse™ off, when nobody's present. + Face localization prior to nose tracking: never loses the user. + Blink detection: toggles Nouse™ on/off by double/multiple blinking. + Second-order change detection: deals with illumination changes. - Joystick and mouse controls disabled.
	Download: NousePaint.exe (included in NouseSetup.exe) Uses Nouse™ to enable a user painting with the nose. // Make sure you run Nouse.exe prior to running NousePaint.exe
	Download: BubbleFrenzy (included in NouseSetup.exe) to play an aim-n-shoot game with your nose. Uses Nouse™ to enable a user playing a well-known aim-n-shoot Bubble-Frenzy game aiming the turret by pointing with the nose. (Slight rotation of head allows to aim precisely in 180^o range)
	Other programs (included with NouseSetup): NousePong™ game (prototype version) allows two users to play a virtual ping-pong game, bouncing the ball with their heads Immersive Environment demo (prototype version) - follow a virtual car by moving your head.

2. Additional features (Technology demonstration programs)
which can be added to Nouse^TM basic or used independently to tailor your Perceptual Vision needs.

	Three-Channel Face Segmentation, Detection and Tracking with Multiple Cameras Download: multi-fd-ed-bd.exe (500Mb). See also: multi-fd-ed-bd-Readme.txt This is a very easy to operate program. No calibration, illumination or setup adjustment is required. All you have to do is to select cameras from the list and see the result of face detection using colour, motion and intensity channels shown in circles. The estimated position of the eyes is shown with overlaid eyeglasses. When blink is detected, two blue dots are overlaid on the the eyes.



	On-line face memorization and recognition in live video streams. See Face in Video memory page for more details. Download: FR-in-video.exe (500Mb) The program allows you to memorize faces either a) from video or b) from image files (if file face_data.txt is located in local directory). The examples of faces are here. The program shows the content of the memory in the right top corner. Grey image means nothing is stored. If you have a local \log directory, the recognition statistics will be written there.