Leading scientists describe how advances in computer vision can change how we interact with computers.

The need for natural and effective Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is increasingly important due to the prevalence of computers in human activities. Computer vision and pattern recognition continue to play a dominant role in the HCI realm. However, computer vision methods often fail to become pervasive in the field due to the lack of real-time, robust algorithms, and novel and convincing applications. This state-of-the-art contributed volume is comprised of articles by prominent experts in computer vision, pattern recognition and HCI. It is the first published text to capture the latest research in this rapidly advancing field with exclusive focus on real-time algorithms and practical applications in diverse and numerous industries, and it outlines further challenges in these areas. Real-Time Vision for Human-Computer Interaction is an invaluable reference for HCI researchers in both academia and industry, and a useful supplement for advanced-level courses in HCI and Computer Vision.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI/ECCV 2006. The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers address a wide range of theoretical and application issues in human-computer interaction ranging from face analysis, gesture and emotion recognition, and event detection to various applications in those fields.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI 2004, held at ECCV 2004 in Prague, Czech Republic in May 2004. The 19 revised full papers presented together with an introductory overview and an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on human-robot interaction, gesture recognition and body tracking, systems, and face and head.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lies at the crossroads of many scienti?c areas including arti?cial intelligence, computer vision, face recognition, motion tracking, etc. In order for HCI systems to interact seamlessly with people, they need to understand their environment through vision and auditory input. Mo- over, HCI systems should learn how to adaptively respond depending on the situation. The goal of this workshop was to bring together researchers from the ?eld of computer vision whose work is related to human-computer interaction. The selected articles for this workshop address a wide range of theoretical and - plication issues in human-computer interaction ranging from human-robot - teraction, gesture recognition, and body tracking, to facial features analysis and human-computer interaction systems. This year 74 papers from 18 countries were submitted and 22 were accepted for presentation at the workshop after being reviewed by at least 3 members of the Program Committee. We had therefore a very competitive acceptance rate of less than 30% and as a consequence we had a very-high-quality workshop. Wewouldliketo thankallmembersofthe ProgramCommitteefor their help in ensuring the quality of the papers accepted for publication. We are grateful to Dr. Jian Wang for giving the keynote address. In addition, we wish to thank the organizers of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and our sponsors, University of Amsterdam, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for support in setting up our workshop.

In its early years, the field of computer vision was largely motivated by researchers seeking computational models of biological vision and solutions to practical problems in manufacturing, defense, and medicine. For the past two decades or so, there has been an increasing interest in computer vision as an input modality in the context of human-computer interaction. Such vision-based interaction can endow interactive systems with visual capabilities similar to those important to human-human interaction, in order to perceive non-verbal cues and incorporate this information in applications such as interactive gaming, visualization, art installations, intelligent agent interaction, and various kinds of command and control tasks. Enabling this kind of rich, visual and multimodal interaction requires interactive-time solutions to problems such as detecting and recognizing faces and facial expressions, determining a person's direction of gaze and focus of attention, tracking movement of the body, and recognizing various kinds of gestures. In building technologies for vision-based interaction, there are choices to be made as to the range of possible sensors employed (e.g., single camera, stereo rig, depth camera), the precision and granularity of the desired outputs, the mobility of the solution, usability issues, etc. Practical considerations dictate that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the variety of interaction scenarios; however, there are principles and methodological approaches common to a wide range of problems in the domain. While new sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect are having a major influence on the research and practice of vision-based interaction in various settings, they are just a starting point for continued progress in the area. In this book, we discuss the landscape of history, opportunities, and challenges in this area of vision-based interaction; we review the state-of-the-art and seminal works in detecting and recognizing the human body and its components; we explore both static and dynamic approaches to "looking at people" vision problems; and we place the computer vision work in the context of other modalities and multimodal applications. Readers should gain a thorough understanding of current and future possibilities of computer vision technologies in the context of human-computer interaction.