Towards a Smart Control Room for Crisis Response Using Visual Perception of Users

Due to ever increasing challenges and complexity, there is a high demand for new human-machine interaction approaches in crisis response scenarios. In the framework of the five-year Fraunhofer internal project “Computer Vision for Human-Computer Interaction – Interaction in and with attentive rooms” we aim at building a smart crisis control room, in which vision-based perception of users will be used to facilitate innovative user interfaces and to support teamwork. Our smart control room is equipped with several cameras and has a videowall as the main output and interaction device. Using real-time computer vision, we can track and identify the users in the room and estimate their head orientations and pointing gestures. In order to build a useful smart control room for crisis response, we are currently focusing on situation modeling for such rooms, and we are investigating the target crisis response scenarios. This paper gives an overview of the project, presents our ongoing work and discusses future work.