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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

Please follow this link https://www.dfki.de/web/presse/pressemitteilung/2017/alterego for the German press release.

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Congratulations to our colleagues for this success!