Hand motion capture has been an active research topic in recent years, following the success of full-body pose tracking. Despite similarities, hand tracking proves to be more challenging, characterized by a higher dimensionality, severe occlusions and self-similarity between fingers. For this reason, most approaches rely on strong assumptions, like hands in isolation or expensive multi-camera systems, that limit the practical use. In this work, we propose a framework for hand tracking that can capture the motion of two interacting hands using only a single, inexpensive RGB-D camera. Our approach combines a generative model with collision detection and discriminatively learned salient points. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on 14 new sequences with challenging interactions.

Benchmarking methods for 3d hand tracking is still an open problem due to the difficulty of acquiring ground truth data. We introduce a new dataset and benchmarking protocol that is insensitive to the accumulative error of other protocols. To this end, we create testing frame pairs of increasing difficulty and measure the pose estimation error separately for each of them. This approach gives new insights and allows to accurately study the performance of each feature or method without employing a full tracking pipeline. Following this protocol, we evaluate various directional distances in the context of silhouette-based 3d hand tracking, expressed as special cases of a generalized Chamfer distance form. An appropriate parameter setup is proposed for each of them, and a comparative study reveals the best performing method in this context.

Post-amputation sensation often translates to the feeling of severe pain in the missing limb, referred to as phantom limb pain (PLP). A clear and rational treatment regimen is difficult to establish, as long as the underlying pathophysiology is not fully known. In this work, an innovative PLP management system is presented, as a module of an holistic computer-mediated pain management environment, namely Epione. The proposed Epione-PLP scheme is structured upon advanced facial expression analysis, used to form a dynamic pain meter, which, in turn, is used to trigger biofeedback and augmented reality-based PLP distraction scenarios. The latter incorporate a model of the missing limb for its visualization, in an effort to provide to the amputee the feeling of its existence and control, and, thus, maximize his/her PLP relief. The novel Epione-PLP management approach integrates edge-technology within the context of personalized health and it could be used to facilitate easing of PLP patients' suffering, provide efficient progress monitoring and contribute to the increase in their quality of life.

An innovative pain management system, namely Epione, is presented here. Epione deals with three main types of pain, i.e., acute pain, chronic pain, and phantom limb pain. In particular, by using facial expression analysis, Epione forms a dynamic pain meter, which then triggers biofeedback and augmented reality-based destruction scenarios, in an effort to maximize patient's pain relief. This unique combination sets Epione not only a novel pain management approach, but also a means that provides an understanding and integration of the needs of the whole community involved i.e., patients and physicians, in a joint attempt to facilitate easing of their suffering, provide efficient monitoring and contribute to a better quality of life.