News

The following papers have been presented at the Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2019 from 9th to 12th of June in Paris, France:

PWOC-3D: Deep Occlusion-Aware End-to-End Scene Flow Estimation Rohan Saxena, René Schuster, Oliver Wasenmüller, Didier Stricker

DeLiO: Decoupled LiDAR Odometry
Queens Maria Thomas, Oliver Wasenmüller, Didier Stricker

The 2019 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV’19) is a premier annual technical forum sponsored by the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS). It brings together researchers and practitioners from universities, industry, and government agencies worldwide to share and discuss the latest advances in theory and technology related to intelligent vehicles. Papers concerning all aspects of intelligent vehicles as well as proposals for workshops and specials sessions are invited for IV’19. For more Information click here.

Our team members have presented the following paper at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference 2019 which took place from 16th to 20th of June 2019 in Long Beach, California, USA and is the “premier” conference in this field (Computer Vision).

SDC – Stacked Dilated Convolution: A Unified Descriptor Network for Dense Matching Tasks
René Schuster, Oliver Wasenmüller, Christian Unger, Didier Stricker

Content: To introduce a new design element for Deep Neural Networks (SDC – Stacked Dilated Convolutions) and beyond that to apply this element in a network for Dense Feature Description. With the new descriptor, we were able to improve matching for stereo disparity, optical flow, and scene flow on different data sets by up to 50%.

Our paper was accepted from 5160 submissions as one of 1294 (acceptance rate: 25.1 %) and was also one of the 288 oral papers (oral presentation in addition to the poster session), oral rate: 5.6 % of submissions, 22.3 % of accepted papers. The presentation can be seen here.

BIONIC is a European research project aiming to develop an unobtrusive, autonomous and privacy preserving platform for real-time risk alerting and continuous persuasive coaching, enabling the design of workplace interventions adapted to the needs and fitness levels of specific ageing workforce. Gamification strategies adapted to the needs and wishes of the elderly workers will ensure optimal engagement for prevention and self-management of musculoskeletal health in any working/living environment.

For more Information visit https://bionic-h2020.eu.

The results of our European project AlterEgo (https://av.dfki.de/projects/alterego/) have been published in the prestigious journal “Nature”. Please follow this link to read the complete article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35813-6

During flights, pilots have to manage difficult situations while facing an increasing system complexity due to the amount and the nature of available information. The idea of Co2Team, Cognitive Collaboration for Teaming, is that a system based on artificial intelligence can provide efficient support to the pilot with the use of cognitive computing. The main objective of the project is to propose a technological and methodological transition to a more autonomous flight transport based on a progressive crew reduction. Co2Team will develop the roadmap of cognitive computing to assist the pilot for future air transport. This transition will be based on an innovative bidirectional communication paradigm and an optimized shared authority (human-machine) using the potential of the cognitive computing (pilot monitoring, environment and situation understanding, enhanced assistance, adaptive automation).

The project partners are the department Augmented Vision at DFKI, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and the Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux (INP Bordeaux).

The first meeting of the project took place on January 8th, 2019, in the premises of the INP Bordeaux. During the meeting, the participants could test an existing flight simulator and discuss possible developments of simulators for the project.

Contact person: Dr. Alain Pagani

Picture: The Co2Team partners at the kick-off event.

ARinfuse is an European project funded under Erasmus+, the EU’s programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe. The objective or ARinfuse is to support individuals in acquiring and developing basic skills and key competences within the field of geoinformatics and utility infrastructure, in order to foster employability. This objective is addressed through the development of new learning modules where Augmented Reality technologies are merged with geoinformatics and applied within the utility infrastructure sector. The developed digital learning content and tools will be implemented in university programs as well as in vocational training programs, and will be made available as Open Educational Resources, open textbooks and Open Source Educational Software.

The Augmented Vision department will contribute to the ARinfuse project by sharing its knowledge and expertise in Augmented Reality technologies for the energy and utilities sector, gained mainly during the European project LARA. Besides DFKI, following partners are collaborating in the project: GeoImaging Ltd (Cyprus), Novogit AB (Sweden), the Cyprus University of Technology (Cyprus), the GISIG association (Italy), the Sewerage Board of Nicosia (Cyprus), and the Flanders Environment Agency (VMM, Belgium).

On December 19th, 2018, the project was officially launched during a kick-off meeting in Nicosia, Cyprus, where the partners started to work on educational and training material and on the specification of the software modules.

Contact person: Dr. Alain Pagani

Picture: The ARinfuse partners at the kick-off event. From left to right: Alain Pagani (DFKI), Elena Valari (GeoImaging), Diofantos Hadjimitsis (CUT), Kiki Charalambus (Sewage Board Nicosia), Konstantinos Smagas (GeoImaging), Katleen Miserez (VMM), Mario Tzouvaras (CUT), Andreas Christofe (CUT), Anders Ostman (Novogit), Aristodemos Anastasiades (GeoImaging), Giorgio Saio (GISIG).

On November 27th 2018, Dr. Alain Pagani was invited by the State Fire and Rescue Service of the Republic of Latvia to give a talk on the use of Augmented Reality for education and awareness raising in the International Conference “Societal Security in the Baltic Sea Region: Challenges and Solutions”.

The main focus of the conference, organized jointly by the State Fire and Rescue Service of Latvia (VUGD) and Riga Stradins Universtiy, in cooperation with the Permanent Secretariat of the Council of the Baltic Sea States, the Swedish Institute and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, was on introducing civil safety in education and the promotion of community awareness of safety in the Baltic Sea region. Dr. Alain Pagani introduced several aspects of Augmented Reality, including recent works from the Department Augmented Vision, and presented advantages of Augmented Reality for education, training and awareness raising.

He could share his views on the use of novel technologies in education during the panel discussion on the subject “education as a core element of societal security culture”, together with Mr Martins Baltmanis, Deputy Chief of the State Fire and Rescue Service of Latvia, Ms Ruta Silina, Head of Division of Communication and International Cooperation at Riga Stradins University, and Ms Elisabeth Braw, Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, United Kingdom.

The Augmented Museum Guide developed in the EU project Eyes of Things has been selected by the EU innovation radar as a “Creation Innovation” and is presented on the innovation radar website. The Innovation Radar platform builds on the information and data gathered by independent experts involved in reviewing ongoing projects funded by H2020, FP7 or CIP. The aim is to make information about EU-funded innovations from high-quality projects visible and accessible to the public in one place (the EU’s new Innovation Radar platform).

The Museum Audio Guide 3.0 is a new type of Audio Guide for museums, where the headset used for audio information is equipped with a miniature camera and a image processing chip. The chip runs an image analysis software that has been trained for a specific exhibit and is able to recognize artworks such as paintings while the user is simply passing by. The painting recognition module is running constantly, but does not consume much power thanks to the dedicated hardware module and the efficient implementation. Thus, the camera-equipped headset can be used for an entire day without the need to change the batteries. From the visitor perspective, this new type of audio guide seems completely natural, as audio information is provided only in the right context, and without the need to care about the technology. An artificial-intelligence-based algorithm is able to detect when the visitor might be interested in audio information and delivers a soft sound notification, informing the user that audio information is available. The visitor can then decide to play the recorded audio by pressing a single button. This technology has already been developed as an output of a former European project (“Eyes of things”), and several prototypes could be successfully tested at the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

The main developers of this demonstrator were the Austrian company Fluxguide and the department Augmented Vision at DFKI.

Contact person: Dr. Alain Pagani

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Learning 6DoF Object Poses from Synthetic Single Channel Images

by Jason Raphael Rambach, Chengbiao Deng, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker  has been accepted at ISMAR 2018.

The paper will be presented in a poster session. The conference will take place in Munich from 16 – 20th October 2018.

The IEEE ISMAR is the leading international academic conference in the fields of Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality.
The symposium is organized and supported by the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE VGTC.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The Augmented Vision Group of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) presented the results of the European project “Eyes of Things” (Grant number 643924) during a final review in September 2018, together with seven partners from across Europe. Following the overall goal of the project, the consortium delivered a miniature and independent Computer Vision system based on a low-power and dedicated vision processor from the company Intel Movidius, with interfaces to three different energy-efficient cameras (AMS-Awaiba NanEye, Sony, Himax). The battery-powered device has a very small form factor, and is able to run computer vision tasks continuously (“always on”) for several days. The developed wireless interface allows for exchanging processed data with companion devices (tablets, smartphones) or for storing information in the cloud. The versatility of the Eyes Of Things device could be successfully demon-strated through the development of four different applications: A doorbell surveillance application which notifies the house owner about visits on his smartphone, a therapy doll which analyses the emotion profile of young patients through vision-based emotion recognition, a multi-purpose camera which synchronizes user-defined events in a cloud-based virtual memory and an intelligent audio guide for museums which recognizes artworks and automatically plays contextual audio comments. During the review, the partners presented the results of pilot tests for all demonstrators.  The consortium received the mention “all project aims have been successfully achieved”, which is the highest possible review outcome. Two of the project’s demonstrators – the multi-purpose surveillance camera and the Augmented Museum Guide – will be developed and commercialized as user products in partnership with DFKI in the upcoming months.

Contact: Dr. Alain Pagani

The Augmented Vision Group of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) co-organized the 2. ACM Computer Science in Cars Symposium 2018 (CSCS’18). CSCS is an annual symposium aiming to create bridges between academic research on the one hand and practitioners from the automotive industry on the other. The two days event combined a single track program with invited keynotes, academic oral presentations, poster presentations and a panel discussion. The symposium provided a platform for industry and academia to exchange ideas and meet these future challenges jointly. The focus of the 2018 symposium was Artificial Intelligence & Security for Autonomous Vehicles.

In the panel discussion the current challenges of Artificial Intelligence for ASAS and Autonomous Vehicles were discussed with experts in this domain. Amongst others the validation of AI systems, the required vision sensor setup and training data, user acceptance, legal challenges, and many more were discussed. The panel was moderated by the AV-member Dr. Oliver Wasenmüller.

CSCS panel discussion: Dr. Oliver Wasenmüller (Team Leader Machine Vision, DFKI), Georg Kuschk (Team Leader Machine Learning, Astyx), Karl Leiss (CEO, BIT-TS), Prof. Dr. Christoph Sorge (Professor Legal Informatics, UdS), Prof. Dr. Christoph Stiller (Director Institute MRT, KIT), Dr. Shervin Raafatnia (AI Validation Engineer, Bosch).

…by Kripasindhu Sarkar, Basavaraj Hampiholi, Kiran Varanasi, Didier Stricker  is accepted in ECCV 2018.

The ECCV-series is a premiere conference of computer vision, organized in alteration with ICCV, the international version on the same topic. Where ICCV is organized on odd years, ECCV is organized on even years. This year ECCV will take place in Munich from 08 – 14 September.

Our team members are presenting the following papers at 6th international conference on 3D Vision:

DeepHPS: End-to-end Estimation of 3D Hand Pose and Shape by Learning from Synthetic Depth by
Jameel Malik; Ahmed Elhayek; Fabrizio Nunnari; Kiran Varanasi; Kiarash Tamaddon; Alexis Heloir; Didier Stricker

NRGA: Gravitational Approach for Non-Rigid Point Set Registration by
Sk Aziz Ali; Vladislav Golyanik; Didier Stricker

Structured Low-Rank Matrix Factorization for Point-Cloud Denoising by
Kripasindhu Sarkar; Florian Bernard; Kiran Varanasi; Christian Theobalt; Didier Stricker

3D Vision will be held in Verona, Italy, September 5 – 8, 2018. It is a rapidly growing conference focusing on all aspects of 3D vision and 3D processing. 3DV provides “a premier platform for disseminating research results covering a broad variety of topics in the area of 3D research in computer vision and graphics, from novel optical sensors, signal processing, geometric modeling, representation and transmission, to visualization and interaction, and a variety of applications”.

More information on the conference program can be found here.

On 24th of July DFKI was honoured with a top-class visit. Accompanied by Prof. Dr. Konrad Wolf, Minister of Science of Rhineland-Palatinate, Federal Minister Anja Karliczek gained insights into current research trends in digital education, machine learning, and the role of people in the factory of the future.

Prof. Didier Stricker explains to Federal Minister Anja Karliczek the system demonstration on “Intelligent verification of the driver’s willingness to take over the vehicle control”. This is based on image and behavior analyses. Photo: DFKI

More detailed information about the visit as well as further pictures can be found in the DFKI press release.

The Augmented Vision department of DFKI was honored as one of the 100 innovative award winners of the competition “Ausgezeichnete Orte im Land der Ideen – Excellent Places in the Country of Ideas” in Berlin on June 4th 2018 during a ceremony in Berlin.

An independent jury selected the projects from almost 1,500 submitted applications. A certificate signed by the Federal President as well as a panel of honor will make the award visible. According to the annual motto “Connecting Worlds – Strengthening Cohesion”, the Augmented Vision department shows how innovations emerge in research and explore “AI for humans”. The department researches on different application areas of Computer Vision, such as Augmented Reality, Medicine and Automotive. The jury highlighted the project “Alter Ego” as particularly praiseworthy in which a digital twin helps patients with social disorders to improve their communication skills.

Dr. Oliver Wasenmüller received the award in Berlin representative for the department Augmented Vision. (credits: Deutschland – Land der Ideen/Bernd Brundert)

On May 15^th Dr. Oliver Wasenmüller was giving a Keynote Lecture on visual perception in autonomous driving on the Mannheim Computer Science Colloquium. In his presentation, he introduced the different stages of autonomous driving and explained the central role of visual perception for them. Decisive for automated driving functions is, for example, the determination of distances to other road users (such as vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, etc.), the detection of lanes and traffic signs or the precise localization of one’s own vehicle. Furthermore, the movements in the environment have to be captured accurately in order to make predictions about the near future. The research of Dr. Wasenmüller’s team ‘Machine Vision and Autonomous Vehicles’ deals exactly with these challenges and is looking for more innovative methods to better perceive the vehicle environment.

The Mannheim Computer Science Colloquium serves to present and discuss new research results as well as new methods, techniques and solutions of computer science. Every month another speaker from science or industry is invited to present the latest trends in a given topic.

Prof. Stricker presented at the INNOSPACE event of Airbus, ESA and HBO the current state of the art of Augmented Reality and newest results about how to automate content creation (see start-up www.ioxp.de) and initialize 3D tracking without any preparation or set-up work.

It is a great honour to announce that our Horizon2020 project LARA, won the Madrid Challenge of the European Satellite Navigation Competition, ESNC 2017. GeoImaging from Nicosia, coordinator and technology partner of LARA project together with SignalGeneriX from Limassol, a technology partner of the project, received the prestigious award on behalf of the LARA consortium.

The ESNC Awards Ceremony took place November 7, 2017 in front of an international audience during the European Space Week 2017 in Tallinn, Estonia.

Dr Stylianidis, coordinator of LARA project and Dr Tasos Kounoudes of SignalGeneriX receive the award from the Director of the GSA, Mr Carlo des Dorides

The ESNC annually awards the best services, products, and business ideas using satellite navigation in everyday life, spurring the development of respective market-driven applications.

This award is a confirmation of success for all the hard work invested by all project partners especially now that the project enters the commercialization phase.

A complete list of this year’s ESNC winners is available at the ESNC 2017 Hal of Fame.

The group Augmented Vision implemented an embedded and ultra-low power machine learning recognition algorithm, which has been tested in the context of trials at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria. The Eyes of Thing is a visual IoT System with AI capability. It has been jointly developed with 8 partners across Europe over the last three years and anticipated the current and very fast development of Embedded Machine Vision using Learning Techniques. High-level computer vision and machine learning are being embedded in more and more devices, paving the way to many new applications.

See the video of the trials, by our partner Fluxguide:

Paper #1 : Fusion of Keypoint Tracking and Facial Landmark Detection for Real-Time Head Pose Estimation by Jilliam Maria Diaz Barros, Bruno Mirbach, Frederic Garcia, Kiran Varanasi, Didier Stricker

Paper #2: SceneFlowFields: Dense Interpolation of Sparse Scene Flow Correspondences by René Schuster, Oliver Wasenmüller, Georg Kuschk, Christian Bailer, Didier Stricker

Paper #3: 3D Shape Processing by Convolutional Denoising Autoencoders on Local Patches by Kripasindhu Sarkar, Kiran Varanasi, Didier Stricker