We are happy to announce that the Augmented Vision group presented 2 papers in the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) that took place from the 4th -8th January 2024 in Waikoloa, Hawaii.
The BERTHA project receives EU funding to develop a Driver Behavioral Model that will make autonomous vehicles safer and more human-like
The project, funded by the European Union with Grant Agreement nº 101076360, will receive 7.9 M€ under the umbrella of the Horizon Europe programme.
The BERTHA project will develop a scalable and probabilistic Driver Behavioral Model which will be key to achieving safer and more human-like connected autonomous vehicles, thus increasing their social acceptance. The solution will be available for academia and industry through an open-source data HUB and in the CARLA autonomous driving simulator.
The project’s consortium gathered on 22-24 November for the kick-off meeting, hosted by the coordinator Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia at its facilities in Spain.
The Horizon Europe project BERTHA kicked off on November 22nd-24th in Valencia, Spain. The project has been granted €7,981,799.50 from the European Commission to develop a Driver Behavioral Model (DBM) that can be used in connected autonomous vehicles to make them safer and more human-like. The resulting DBM will be available on an open-source HUB to validate its feasibility, and it will also be implemented in CARLA, an open-source autonomous driving simulator.
The project celebrated its kick-off meeting on November 22nd to 24th, hosted by the coordinator Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia (IBV) at its offices in Valencia, Spain. During the event, all partners met each other, shared their technical backgrounds and presented their expected contributions to the project.
The need for a Driver Behavioral Model in the CCAM industry
The industry of Connected, Cooperative, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) presents important opportunities for the European Union. However, its deployment requires new tools that enable the design and analysis of autonomous vehicle components, together with their digital validation, and a common language between Tier vendors and OEM manufacturers.
One of the shortcomings arises from the lack of a validated and scientifically based Driver Behavioral Model (DBM) to cover the aspects of human driving performance, which will allow to understand and test the interaction of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) with other cars in a safer and predictable way from a human perspective.
Therefore, a Driver Behavioral Model could guarantee digital validation of the components of autonomous vehicles and, if incorporated into the ECUs software, could generate a more human-like response of such vehicles, thus increasing their acceptance.
The contributions of BERTHA to the autonomous vehicles industry and research
To cover this need in the CCAM industry, the BERTHA project will develop a scalable and probabilistic Driver Behavioral Model (DBM), mostly based on Bayesian Belief Network, which will be key to achieving safer and more human-like autonomous vehicles.
The new DBM will be implemented on an open-source HUB, a repository that will allow industrial validation of its technological and practical feasibility, and become a unique approach for the model’s worldwide scalability.
The resulting DBM will be translated into CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research developed by the Spanish partner Computer Vision System. The implementation of BERTHA’s DBM will use diverse demos which allow the building of new driving models in the simulator. This can be embedded in different immersive driving simulators as HAV from IBV.
BERTHA will also develop a methodology which, thanks to the HUB, will share the model with the scientific community to ease its growth. Moreover, its results will include a set of interrelated demonstrators to show the DBM approach as a reference to design human-like, easily predictable, and acceptable behaviour of automated driving functions in mixed traffic scenarios.
Teilnehmer des Kick-Off-Treffens des KIMBA Forschungsvorhabens stehen vor einem mobilen Prallbrecher von Projektpartner KLEEMANN. // Participants of the kick-off meeting of the KIMBA research project standing in front of a mobile impact crusher from project partner KLEEMANN
[Deutsche Version]
Im Rahmen der Digital GreenTech Konferenz 2023 in Karlsruhe wurden kürzlich 14 neue Forschungsprojekte aus den Bereichen Wasserwirtschaft, nachhaltiges Landmanagement, Ressourceneffizienz und Kreislaufwirtschaft vorgestellt, darunter auch Kimba. Hierbei arbeiten wir gemeinsam mit unseren Projektpartnern an einer KI-basierten Prozesssteuerung und automatisiertem Qualitätsmanagement für das Recycling von Bau- und Abbruchabfällen in Echtzeit. Das spart Kosten, Zeit sowie Ressourcen und schont die Umwelt. So unterstützen wir die Baubranche auf ihrem Weg in die Zukunft.
At the Digital GreenTech Conference 2023 in Karlsruhe, 14 new research projects in the fields of water management, sustainable land management, resource efficiency and circular economy were recently presented, including Kimba. Here, we are working with our project partners on AI-based process control and automated quality management for recycling construction and demolition waste in real time. This saves costs, time and resources and protects the environment. This is how we support the construction industry on its way into the future.
Alt-Text: Teilnehmer des Kick-Off-Treffens des ReVise-UP Forschungsvorhabens stehen vor dem Bergbaugebäude der RWTH Aachen University. // Participants of the kick-off meeting of the ReVise-UP research project stand in front of the mining building of RWTH Aachen University.
Deutsche Version
Forschungsvorhaben „ReVise-UP“ zur Verbesserung der Prozesseffizienz des werkstofflichen Kunststoffrecyclings mittels Sensortechnik gestartet
Im September 2023 startete das vom BMBF geförderte Forschungsvorhaben ReVise-UP („Verbesserung der Prozesseffizienz des werkstofflichen Recyclings von Post-Consumer Kunststoff-Verpackungsabfällen durch intelligentes Stoffstrommanagement – Umsetzungsphase“). In der vierjährigen Umsetzungsphase soll die Transparenz und Effizienz des werkstofflichen Kunststoffrecyclings durch Entwicklung und Demonstration sensorbasierter Stoffstromcharakterisierungsmethoden im großtechnischen Maßstab gesteigert werden.
Auf Basis der durch Sensordaten erzeugten Datentransparenz soll das bisherige Kunststoffrecycling durch drei Effekte verbessert werden: Erstens sollen durch die Datentransparenz positive Anreize für verbesserte Sammel- und Produktqualitäten und damit gesteigerte Rezyklatmengen und -qualitäten geschaffen werden. Zweitens sollen sensorbasiert erfasste Stoffstromcharakteristika dazu genutzt werden, Sortier-, Aufbereitungs- und Kunststoffverarbeitungsprozesse auf schwankende Stoffstromeigenschaften adaptieren zu können. Drittens soll die verbesserte Datenlage eine ganzheitliche ökologische und ökonomische Bewertung der Wertschöpfungskette ermöglichen.
Research project “ReVise-UP” started to improve the process efficiency of mechanical plastics recycling using sensor technology
In September 2023, the BMBF-funded research project ReVise-UP (“Improving the process efficiency of mechanical recycling of post-consumer plastic packaging waste through intelligent material flow management – implementation phase”) started. In the four-year implementation phase, the transparency and efficiency of mechanical plastics recycling is to be increased by developing and demonstrating sensor-based material flow characterization methods on an industrial scale.
Based on the data transparency generated by sensor data, the current plastics recycling shall be improved by three effects: First, data transparency is intended to create positive incentives for improved collection and product qualities and thus increased recyclate quantities and qualities. Second, sensor-based material flow characteristics are to be used to adapt sorting, treatment and plastics processing processes to fluctuating material flow properties. Third, the improved data situation should enable a holistic ecological and economic evaluation of the value chain.
DFKI Augmented Vision researchers Praveen Nathan, Sandeep Inuganti, Yongzhi Su and Jason Rambach received their 1st 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
On the 5th and 6th 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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
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.
