On October 9th, 2015, Kenneth Funes was awarded the EPFL doctorate for his dissertation entitled “3D Gaze Estimation from Remote RGB-D sensors”.

Kenneth Funes successfully defended his private examination in front of a committee of experts, composed of Prof. Dan Witzner Hansen, Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency, Dr. Ronan Boulic, Prof. Kamiar Aminian and Dr. Jean-Marc Odobez on May 29th, 2015, whereas on October 9th, 2015, he presented his public defense at EPFL, as a final step towards the completion of his PhD.

His research, conducted in the Perception and Activity Understanding laboratory of Idiap, lead by Dr. J.-M. Odobez, deals with the estimation of eye-gaze within the 3D space using consumer RGB-D cameras (standard imaging together with depth imaging). This work addressed the problems of low-resolution sensing, head pose variations and lack of user-specific calibration. Many applications within human-robot interaction, psychology, human-computer interaction, and others, can benefit from this work. In particular, his dissertation also addressed  the estimation of high-level non-verbal cues such as visual focus of attention within natural dyadic and group human-human interactions. This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation www.snf.ch.

More details and resources can be found within the website www.idiap.ch/project/g3e and in his dissertation: 3D Gaze Estimation from Remote RGB-D sensors

Kenneth will continue being based at Idiap Research Institute as a post-doctoral researcher, mainly working towards the creation of a new start-up called “Eyeware”, which builds upon his PhD thesis work to provide solutions for assistive technologies, psychology, HCI, and robotics.

Congratulations to Kenneth Funes  for his excellent work.

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To download  Kenneth's thesis, click on the following link: 3D Gaze Estimation from Remote RGB-D sensors