Ganesh Swami

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Fivepoint Technologies is a company that a bunch of us started for our fourth year school project. The ‘us’ would be Ganesh Swami, David Brayden, Kjell Eggen and Phoenix Yuan. Our flagship product was called Voiceture, a electro-mechanical glove that can be used to translate the ASL gestures into text and voice (Voice+Gesture=Voiceture).

Technology

The core of our technique was the use of a learned manifold to do feature matching. In simple terms, we modeled each alphabet as a gaussian surface on the multidimensional surface. This can be seen in the gaussian plot in the picture above (for two dimensions). The parameters of the gaussian (deviation and mean) came from the training stage. By continuous integration of sensor readings, we were able to treat the manifold as a multi-dimensional probability distribution function.

Media

We got a lot of exposure by doing this project. We appeared on the frontpage of the SFU homepage, the cover story of SFU news (the campus periodical), mentioned in the Vancouver Sun, 24 hours, Statistical News, and yet another Chinese newspaper. We were also interviewed on CityTV (Breakfast Television) and ShawTV. We also presented the project at three openhouses and the Western Engineering Conference in Calgary.

Thanks

I learnt about the glove from an incredibly smart friend of mine, Karthik Narayanswami who had used it for molecular modeling. These gloves were going for about thirty dollars on eBay.