News

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

Dr. Jason Rambach, gave a talk on “Building Virtual Worlds with 3D Sensing and AI” at the NEM Summit 2024 in Brussels on the 23.10.2024. The presentation was part of the AI for Virtual Worlds session organized by Future Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR). The presentation with results from the Project HumanTech and various XR projects based on object pose estimation technology from DFKI, was followed by an exciting panel discussion.                                                

Contact: Dr. Jason Rambach

The HumanTech project, under the coordination of DFKI Augmented Vision – Dr. Jason Rambach, has reached another key milestone with a highly productive General Assembly Meeting held from 5 to 6 September 2024 at the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS), Athlone Campus, Ireland. As the project is on its final path toward completion next year, this meeting marked an important step in aligning strategies and objectives for the remaining phases.

The overall status of the project shows that everything is progressing as planned, with the pilots well on track and providing a solid foundation for both achieving the current project goals and supporting future research and development initiatives. Additionally, participants enjoyed a guided tour and live demonstration at TUS’s state-of-the-art robotics department, showcasing cutting-edge technology that will play a crucial role in advancing AI applications in the construction industry.

For more on HumanTech: https://humantech-horizon.eu/news/

Contact: Dr. Jason Rambach

We are glad to announce that our paper, Text2CAD: Generating Sequential CAD Models from Beginner-to-Expert Level Text Prompts has been accepted as a spotlight presentation at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024. The project page is available here. Our research introduces the first AI framework to generate sequential CAD designs from text prompts that include numerical parameters. We look forward to presenting our work in Vancouver, Canada.

Contact: muhammad_zeshan.afzal@dfki.de , mohammad.khan@dfki.de

Dr. Jason Rambach, coordinator of the EU Horizon Project HumanTech , participated in the “Digital Twins for Sustainable Construction” session at the Sustainable Places conference in Luxembourg (23.9-27.9) organized by projects of the Tech4Construction cluster.

Dr. Rambach presented results from the Project HumanTech, focusing on the automated Scan-to-BIM problem. In addition, he was a panel member for the ensuing discussion together with coordinator and members of other ongoing projects in construction and building management such as RobetArme, Beeyonders, InCube and Reincarnate.

Workshop schedule: https://www.sustainableplaces.eu/sp2024/exploring-digital-twins-machine-human-collaboration-and-sustainable-construction/

HumanTech project:     https://humantech-horizon.eu/                                                           

Contact: Dr. Jason Rambach

The Network of Excellence dAIEDGE held its General Assembly meeting on September 5^th and 6th, looking back at the achievements of the last 12 months, and preparing the next steps of the network! It’s been two days full of inspiration and breakthroughs in Heraklion, Crete!

The 36 dAIEDGE partners gathered to share achievements and define the roadmap towards our big goal: To make Europe a world leader in AI and data economy!

During this event, we reinforced our strategic partnerships and strengthened our joint commitment to take technological innovation to another level.

A big thank to our partner ICS-FORTH for being exceptional hosts and making this assembly an unforgettable experience.

We continue to move forward together towards a bright future of innovation and growth!

Coordinator: Dr. Alain Pagani

Project Manager : Dr. Mohamed Selim

We are very happy that our paper “CLEO: Continual Learning of Evolving Ontologies” has been accepted to the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV). A preprint of our work can be found here. A short video is available on YouTube. The paper is a joint work with ZF Friedrichshafen AG and describes some results of our collaboration.

We are proud to announce that our paper “RMS-FlowNet++: Efficient and Robust Multi-scale Scene Flow Estimation for Large-Scale Point Clouds” by Ramy Battrawy, René Schuster, and Didier Stricker has been published in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV). The online version of the paper can be found here a preprint is available here. The paper extends our previous work on efficient scene flow estimation in dense point clouds that has been published at ICRA 2022.