Michael Van den Bergh Professional Profile

Michael Van den Bergh obtained his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the KU Leuven, Belgium in 2004. He completed his master thesis in the VISICS lab at the Electrical Engineering institute (ESAT) from the KU Leuven, Belgium. He joined the Computer Vision Laboratory at the ETH Zurich in 2005 where he worked as a research assistant and Ph.D. student in the field of Human-computer Interaction. In 2010, he finished his doctoral thesis "Visual Body Pose Analysis for Human-Computer Interaction" and was awarded a Ph.D. degree from the ETH Zurich [contact].
 

Research Topics

Hand Gesture Interaction: Real-time detection of hands and hand gestures for 3D interaction with interactive models displayed on large screens.

Kinect (Prime Sense), 3D Vision and Stereo Vision: Detection and gesture recognition in a calibrated stereo or 3D system, either using two color cameras, or combing a color camera with a Time-of-Flight depth camera, or using a Kinect sensor. These techniques allow for detection of 3D pointing direction, hand gesture interaction and for segmenting the hand from faces and persons behind it.

Full Body Pose Recognition: Real-time and orientation-invariant recognition of the full body posture based on 2D silhouettes (from multiple camera viewpoints) or based on 3D hulls. This technology is used in the CyberWalk project, where a person is immersed in a virtual city while walking on an omni-directional treadmill.

 

Publications

A. De Luca, R. Mattone, P. Giordano, H. Ulbrich, M. Schwaiger, M. Van den Bergh, E. Koller-Meier and L. Van Gool, "Motion Control of the CyberCarpet Platform", IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology [in press]

M. Van den Bergh and L. Van Gool, "Real-time Stereo and Flow-based Video Segmentation with Superpixels", Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2011), January 2012, Breckenridge, Colorado [in press]

D. Uebersax, M. Van den Bergh, J. Gall and L. Van Gool, "Real-time Sign Language Letter and Word Recognition from Depth Data", IEEE Workshop on Human Computer-Interaction in conjunction with ICCV 2011, November 2011, Barcelona, Spain [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, D. Carton, R. De Nijs, N. Mitsou, C. Landsiedel, K. Kuehnlenz, D. Wollherr, L. Van Gool and M. Buss, "Real-time 3D Hand Gesture Interaction with a Robot for Understanding Directions from Humans", Proceedings of 20th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 2011, Atlanta, Georgia [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, and L. Van Gool, "Combining RGB and ToF Cameras for Real-time 3D Hand Gesture Interaction", Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2011), January 2011, Kona, Hawaii [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, "Visual Body Pose Analysis for Human-Computer Iteraction", Ph.D. Thesis, January 2010, Zurich, Switzerland [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, F. Bosche, E. Koller-Meier, and L. Van Gool, "Haarlet-based Hand Gesture Recognition for 3D Interaction", Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2009), December 2009, Snowbird, Utah [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, J. Halatsch, A. Kunze, F. Bosché, L. Van Gool and G. Schmitt, "A Novel camera-based System for Collaborative Interaction with Multi-dimensional Data Models", 9th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (ConVR), November 2009, Sydney, Australia [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, E. Koller-Meier, L. Van Gool, "Real-time Body Pose Recognition using 2D or 3D Haarlets", International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 83, pp. 72-84, 2009 [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, R. Kehl, E. Koller-Meier, L. Van Gool, "Real-time 3D Body Pose Estimation", Multi-Camera Networks: Concepts and Applications, Hamid Aghajan, Andrea Cavallaro, Ed., ELSEVIER, pp. 335-360, 2009 [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, E. Koller-Meier, L. Van Gool, "Fast Body Posture Estimation using Volumetric Features", IEEE Workshop on Motion and Video Computing (WMVC 2008), January 2008, Copper Mountain, Colorado [PDF]

M. Van den Bergh, W. Servaes, G. Caenen, S. De Roeck, L. Van Gool, "Perceptive User Interface, a Generic Approach", Computer Vision in Human-Computer Interaction: ICCV 2005 Workshop on HCI, October 2005, Beijing, China [PDF]
 

Awards

Annual Barco prize for Best Master Theses 2004, for the thesis titled "Perceptive User Interface, a Generic Approach", January 2005.

 

Projects

Interactive Urban Robot (IURO): The IURO project aims to build a robot that autonomously finds its way to pre-defined places, people or items in quickly changing environments through proactive communication with passers-by. In general, interactive robots provide people with information they need or want to have, like mobile museum guides. People address the robot and know what to obtain from it. For IURO we invert the perspective: The robot addresses arbitrarily passers-by in public (urban) areas in order to obtain 'vital' information from them: In which direction is square X? Where can I find shop Y? These are everyday knowledge gaps experienced by human pedestrians. We assume that mobile service robots will experience the same gaps while navigating outdoor in public spaces. (link).

CyberWalk: Walking is the most natural way for humans to navigate through their environment. To date, however, it is almost impossible to physically walk through Virtual Environments in an unconstrained way. In the EU project "CyberWalk" we developed an omni-directional treadmill, which together with markerless tracking, optimized control and several perceptual tricks enables humans to walk through Virtual Worlds in a natural and unconstrained fashion (link).

Value Lab: The Value Lab is an essential space in the new Information Science Laboratory (HIT) and represents the fusion between built architecture and digital design sciences. The Value Lab enables users to work together interactively. This lab will be integrated in challenging scientific projects within the ETH Zurich and with cooperation partners of the ETH Zurich. It will be used in teaching and for research purposes, such as analysis of large data sets, applications in marketing and monitoring, applications in real-time visualization, distributed real-time image rendering, and interactive screen design. The system will also support general usage for presentations, lectures, press and videoconferences. (link).