Computers Seeing People

AI researchers are interested in building intelligent machines that can interact with them as they interact with each other. Much effort has been expended on "automatic deduction of structure of a possibly dynamic three-dimensional world from two-dimensional images" (Nalwa 1993). There has been considerable progress in the areas of object recognition, image understanding, and scene reconstruction from single and multiple images. This progress, coupled with the improvements in computational power, has prompted a new research focus of making machines that can see people; recognize them; and interpret their gestures, expressions, and actions. In this article, I present methods that give machines the ability to see people, understand their actions, and interact with them.