December 2024

Our paper “G3FA: Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation” was presented at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2024 by Alireza Javanmardi from the Augmented Vision Department DFKI!

The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) is one of the major international conferences on computer vision and related areas and is organised by the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA). This year it was held in Glasgow from November 25^th to 28^th.

Our work presents a method for real-time face re-enactment from one single source image and addresses a key limitation of GAN-based face animation: geometric consistency.

G3FA enhances realism, especially in challenging head poses, by:

• Utilizing implicit 3D supervision through inverse rendering to extract depth and normal maps from 2D images, guiding the generator towards greater accuracy.
• Employing an ensemble of discriminators to incorporate the 3D properties, improving the generator’s understanding of human head structure.
• Leveraging face volume rendering with orthogonal ray sampling and volume rendering for high-quality image synthesis.

Check out the paper:

G3FA: Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation, Alireza Javanmardi, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2024

Link to the paper

Code is available at github.com/dfki-av/G3FA

Contact: Alireza Javanmardi, Alain Pagani

The Network of Excellence dAIEDGE co-organized the  European Conference on EDGE AI Technologies and Applications (EEAI 2024) in Cagliary, Italy on October 21-23, 2024.

Over the three days, more than 50 presenters took part in 12 keynotes and parallel sessions, addressing more than 20 topics, where participants discussed how Edge AI is redefining the future of technological applications and systems.

dAIEDGE Partners contributed to the EEAI programme with presentations that offered a practical and innovative view of Edge AI in action, highlighting its transformative potential in sectors such as sustainability, energy and security:

FPGA Acceleration for SAR Imagery-Based Sea Ice Mapping: This presentation, by Rashed Al Koutayni (DFKI), addressed the use of FPGA accelerators to improve the speed and accuracy of sea ice mapping using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery.

Functional and Non-Functional Requirements in Edge AI Systems: Ovidiu Vermesan (SINTEF, Norway) and Alain Pagani (DFKI, Germany) discussed the challenges associated with functional and non-functional requirements in Edge AI systems, addressing both operational needs and ethical and legal constraints.

Legal Requirements for Trustworthy Edge AI: Lydia Belkadi from KU Leuven addressed the regulations needed to ensure trustworthy edge AI solutions

The event allowed participants not only to learn from leading experts, but also to network and connect with the best in the industry, strengthening a community of experts and practitioners who are driving innovation in Edge AI.

Coordinator: Dr. Alain Pagani

Project Manager: Dr. Mohamed Selim

The researchers of the Augmented Vision department presented their latest research activities in the field of eXtended Reality at the EuroXR conference in Athens, from November 27^th to 29^th, 2024.

The European Association for eXtended Reality (EuroXR) Conference is the ultimate gathering for Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). This year, the conference was co-organized by the Institute of Communication and Computer System (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

This year, a joint event on Next Generation XR was co-organized by six European Projects, among them CORTEX2, LUMINOUS and SHARESPACE, all coordinated by the Augmented Vision department at DFKI.

• Alain Pagani presented the recent work on cooperative telepresence in the project CORTEX2
• Michael Lorenz talked about social XR in SHARESPACE
• Zeshan Afzal featured the use of language models for XR in the project LUMINOUS

The coordinators took part in a panel discussion about the “Future of XR”, in which they could share their view about the next steps in XR research and development.

In addition, the AV group presented two application papers and one demonstrator, which attracted the interest of the conference participants

• “Augmented telecommunication in factory setting”, Narek Minaskan, Bastian Krayer, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, EuroXR 2024
• “AR Assistant for Pruning of Grapevines and Fruit Trees”, Mariia Podguzova, Simon Haering, Jamiu Ojeleye, Stephan Krauss, Didier Stricker, EuroXR 2024
• “Industrial remote cooperation (Demo)”, Bastian Krayer, Narek Minaskan, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, EuroXR

The paper “AR Assistant for Pruning of Grapevines and Fruit Trees” won the EuroXR 2024 Best Application Paper award – Congratulations to the authors!

 
Contact: Dr. Alain Pagani