News

DFKI Augmented Vision researchers Praveen Nathan, Sandeep Inuganti, Yongzhi Su and Jason Rambach received their 1^st place award in the prestigious BOP Object Pose Estimation Challenge 2023 in the categories Overall Best RGB Method, Overall Best Segmentation Method and The Best BlenderProc-Trained Segmentation Method.

The BOP benchmark and challenge addresses the problem of 6-degree-of-freedom object pose estimation, which is of great importance for many applications such as robot grasping or augmented reality. This year, the BOP challenge was held within the “8th International Workshop on Recovering 6D Object Pose (R6D)” http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/sixd/workshop_2023/  at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in Paris, France https://iccv2023.thecvf.com/  .

The awards were received by Yongzhi Su and Dr. Jason Rambach on behalf of the DFKI Team and a short presentation of the method followed. The winning method was based on the CVPR 2022 paper “ZebraPose”  

The winning approach was developed by a team led by DFKI AV, with contributing researchers from Zhejiang University.

List of contributing researchers:

DFKI Augmented Vision: Praveen Nathan, Sandeep Inuganti, Yongzhi Su, Didier Stricker, Jason Rambach

Zhejiang University:  Yongliang Lin, Yu Zhang

On the 5^th and 6^th of September 2023, the new EU project dAIEdge “A network of excellence for distributed, trustworthy, efficient and scalable AI at the Edge“ officially took off.

The kick-off meeting held at DFKI in Kaiserslautern was an excellent occasion to meet with the 36 partners from 15 European countries and launch the activities of the network!

The main goal of dAIEDGE is to support and ensure the rapid development and market adoption of distributed edge AI technologies, such as hardware, software, frameworks, and tools.

The applications of dAIEDGE will be used in a wide range of domains, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent transportation systems, satellite imagery and robotics.

The network has a project volume of €14.4 million, of which €10.7 million is funded by the European Union. Looking forward to a fruitful collaboration and a successful project!

Contact persons:

Dr. Alain Pagani

Dr. Mohamed Selim

DFKI Augmented Vision is collaborating with Stellantis on the topic of Radar-Camera Fusion for Automotive Object Detection using Deep Learning. Recently, two new publications were accepted to the GCPR 2023 and EUSIPCO 2023 conferences.

The 2 new publications are:

1.  Cross-Dataset Experimental Study of Radar-Camera Fusion in Bird’s-Eye View,  Proceedings of the 31st. European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO-2023), September 4-8, Helsinki, Finland, IEEE, 2023.

Lukas Stefan Stäcker, Philipp Heidenreich, Jason Rambach, Didier Stricker

This paper investigates the influence of the training dataset and transfer learning on camera-radar fusion approaches, showing that while the camera branch needs large and diverse training data, the radar branch benefits more from a high-performance radar.

Cross-Dataset Experimental Study of Radar-Camera Fusion in Bird’s-Eye View

2. RC-BEVFusion: A Plug-In Module for Radar-Camera Bird’s Eye View Feature Fusion,  Proceedings of. Annual Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM-2023), September 19-22, Heidelberg, BW, Germany, DAGM, 9/2023.

Lukas Stefan Stäcker, Shashank Mishra, Philipp Heidenreich, Jason Rambach, Didier Stricker

This paper introduces a new Bird’s Eye view fusion network architecture for camera-radar fusion for 3D object detection that performs favorably on the NuScenes dataset benchmark.

RC-BEVFusion: A Plug-In Module for Radar-Camera Bird’s Eye View Feature Fusion

Contacts: Dr. Jason Rambach

We are happy to announce that the Augmented Vision group will present 4 papers in the upcoming ICCV 2023 Conference, 2-6 October, Paris, France. The IEEE/CVF International Conference in Computer Vision (ICCV) is the premier international computer vision event. Homepage: https://iccv2023.thecvf.com/  

The 4 accepted papers are:

1. U-RED: Unsupervised 3D Shape Retrieval and Deformation for Partial Point Clouds
   Yan Di, Chenyangguang Zhang, Ruida Zhang, Fabian Manhardt, Yongzhi Su, Jason Raphael Rambach, Didier Stricker, Xiangyang Ji, Federico Tombari
2. FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light Vision. Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Goutham Kallempudi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
3. Introducing Language Guidance in Prompt-based Continual Learning Muhammad Gulzain Ali Khan, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem; Luc Van Gool; Federico  Tombari; Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
4. DELO: Deep Evidential LiDAR Odometry using Partial Optimal Transport Sk Aziz Ali, Djamila Aouada, Gerd Reis, Didier Stricker

The first AI-Observer Summer School was held at the Eratosthenes Center of Excellence in Limassol, Cyprus, from July 10-14. Training sessions were given by Prof. Fabio Del Frate, Giorgia Guerrisi and Lorenzo Giuliano Papale (Tor Vergata University of Rome), and Dr. Gerd Reis (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence). During the five-day hybrid event, more than 50 participants learned about the application of artificial intelligence in Earth observation, with special focus on disaster risk management. Topics included deforestation, flood detection, and natural hazard management using Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR), and Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Imaging (MSI) data.

AI-OBSERVER consortium:
Eratosthenes Center of Excellence
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz
Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata
Cellock Ltd.

We are glad to announce that our colleague Michael Lorenz won a best Paper award for his work On Motions artifacts arising when integrating inertial sensors into loose clothing such as a working jacket.

Abstract

The team of the EU Horizon Project HumanTech , consisting of Mahdi Chamseddine and Dr. Jason Rambach from DFKI Augmented Vision as well as Fabian Kaufmann from RPTU Kaiserslautern – department of Civil Engineering, received the 3^rd place prize in the Scan-to-BIM challenge of the (Computer Vision in the Built Environment) CV4_AEC Workshop of the CVPR 2023 conference.

On the 18.6, the team presented their solution and results as part of the workshop program. Scan-to-BIM solutions are of great importance for the construction community as they automate the generation of as-built models of buildings from 3D scans, and can be used for quality monitoring, robotic task planning and XR visualization, among other applications.

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

CV4AEC Workshop page: https://cv4aec.github.io/

Contact: Dr. Jason Rambach , Mahdi Chamseddine

Dr. Jason Rambach, coordinator of the EU Horizon Project HumanTech co-organized a special session on “Human Factors in Construction Robotics” at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO 2023) in Berlin, Germany (5.6-7.6). The organization of the special session was done by Jason Rambach, Gabor Sziebig, Research Manager at SINTEF, and Mihoko Niitsuma, Professor at Chuo University.

The program of the special session included the following talks:

• Serena Ivaldi (INRIA) – Teleoperating a robot for removing asbestos tiles on roofs: Insights from a pilot study
• Jason Rambach (DFKI) – Machine perception for human-robot handover scenarios in construction
• Patricia Helen Rosen (BAUA) – Design recommendations for construction robots – a human-centred perspective
• Dimitrios Giakoumis (CERTH ITI) – Designing human-robot interaction interfaces for shotcrete construction robots; the RobetArme project case

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

Contact: Dr. Jason Rambach

We are happy to announce that our paper titled

“Structure PLP-SLAM: Efficient Sparse Mapping and Localization using Point, Line and Plane for Monocular, RGB-D and Stereo Cameras” Fangwen Shu, Jiaxuan Wang, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker

has been accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023.

In this paper, we present a visual SLAM system that uses both points and lines for robust camera localization, and
simultaneously performs a piece-wise planar reconstruction (PPR) of the environment to provide a structural map in
real-time. Our proposed SLAM tightly incorporates the semantic and geometric features to boost both frontend pose tracking and backend map optimization.

The ICRA conference takes place this year in London, from May 29th to June 2nd.

Contact: Dr. Alain Pagani

Dr. Jason Rambach, coordinator of the EU Horizon Project HumanTech co-organized a workshop on “AI and Robotics in Construction” at the European Robotics Forum 2023 in Odense, Denmark (March 14th to 16th, 2023) in cooperation with the construction Robotics projects Beeyonders and RobetArme.

From the project HumanTech, Jason Rambach presented an overview of the project objectives as well as insights into the results achieved by Month 9 of the project. Patrick Roth from the partner Implenia, presented the perspective and challenges of the construction industry on the use of Robotics and AI in construction sites, while the project partners Dr. Bharath Sankaran (Naska.AI) and Dr. Gabor Sziebig (SINTEF) participated in a panel session discussing the future of Robotics in construction.

Workshop schedule: https://erf2023.sdu.dk/timetable/event/ai-and-robotics-in-construction/

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

Contact: Dr. Jason Rambach