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.
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
Inertial human motion capture (IHMC) has become a robust tool to estimate human kinematics in the wild such as industrial facilities.
In contrast to optical motion capture, where occlusions might take place, the kinematics of a worker can be continuously provided.
This is for instance a prerequisite for an ergonomic assessments of the workers.
State-of-the-art IHMC solutions require inertial sensors to be tightly attached to body segments.
This requires an additional setup time and lowers the practicability and ease of use when it comes to an industrial application.
In contrast, sensors integrated into loose clothing such as a working jacket, may yield corrupted kinematics estimates due to the additional motion of loose clothing.
In this work we present a study of orientations deviations obtained from kinematics estimates using tightly attached inertial sensors and into a working jacket integrated ones.
We performed a quantitative analysis using data from the two hardware setups worn by 19 subjects performing different industry related tasks and measures of their body shapes.
Using this data we approximated probability distributions of the deviation angles for each person and body segment.
Applying different statistical measures we could gain insights to questions like, how severe orientation deviations are, if there is an influence of body shapes on the distribution and how probability distributions of the deviation angles can indicate physical motion limitations of a sensor attached to a segment.
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.
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.
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.
The kick-off meeting for the EU project ExtremeXP was held on January 26th and 27th, 2023, in the city of Athens, Greece.
The vision of ExtremeXP “EXPerimentation driven and user eXPerience-oriented analytics for eXtremely Precise outcomes and decisions” is to provide accurate, precise, fit-for-purpose, and trustworthy data-driven insights via evaluating different complex analytics variants, considering end users’ preferences and feedback in an automated way.
Dr. Alain Pagani enlightened the audience on the capabilities of the Augmented Vision department, highlighting the expertise and key strengths it brings to the table in the realm of Augmented Reality and Explainability.
ExtremeXP will provide:
Specification and semantics for modelling complex user-experience-driven analytics.
Automated and scalable data management for complex analytics workflow.
Scenario-driven and opportunistic machine learning to design and develop AutoML mechanisms for performing scenario-based algorithm and model selection considering on-demand user-provided constraints (performance, resources, time, model options).
User-experience- and experiment-driven optimization of complex analytics to design the architecture of the framework for experiment-driven optimisation of complex analytics.
Transparent decision making with interactive visualisation methods to explore how augmented reality, visual analytics, and other visualisation techniques and their combinations can enhance user experience for different use cases, actors, domains, applications, and problem areas
Extreme data access control and knowledge management
Test and validation framework and application on different impactful real-life use cases to incorporate the ExtremeXP tools, methods, models, and software into a scalable, usable, and interoperable integrated framework for complex experiment-driven analytics
The project consortium consists of 20 partners, which are:
Athena Research Center (coordinator) [Greece]
Activeeon [France]
Airbus Defense and Spaces SLC [France]
BitSparkles [France]
Bournemouth University [United Kingdom]
CS-Group [France]
Charles University of Prague [Czech Republic]
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz [Germany]
Fundacio Privada I2cat, Internet I Innovacio Digital A Catalunya [Spain]
Institute of Communications and Computer Systems [Greece]
We are happy to announce that our article “OPA-3D: Occlusion-Aware Pixel-Wise Aggregation for Monocular 3D Object Detection” was published in the prestigious IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) Journal. The work is a collaboration of DFKI with the TU Munich and Google. The article is openly accessible at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=10021668
Abstract: Monocular 3D object detection has recently made a significant leap forward thanks to the use of pre-trained depth estimators for pseudo-LiDAR recovery. Yet, such two-stage methods typically suffer from overfitting and are incapable of explicitly encapsulating the geometric relation between depth and object bounding box. To overcome this limitation, we instead propose to jointly estimate dense scene depth with depth-bounding box residuals and object bounding boxes, allowing a two-stream detection of 3D objects that harnesses both geometry and context information. Thereby, the geometry stream combines visible depth and depth-bounding box residuals to recover the object bounding box via explicit occlusion-aware optimization. In addition, a bounding box based geometry projection scheme is employed in an effort to enhance distance perception. The second stream, named as the Context Stream, directly regresses 3D object location and size. This novel two-stream representation enables us to enforce cross-stream consistency terms, which aligns the outputs of both streams, and further improves the overall performance. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark demonstrate that OPA-3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the main Car category, whilst keeping a real-time inference speed.
DFKI Augmented Vision recently released the first publicly available UWB Radar Driving Activity Dataset (RaDA), consisting of over 10k data samples from 10 different participants annotated with 6 driving activities. The dataset was recorded in the DFKI driving simulator environment. For more information and to download the dataset please check the project website: https://projects.dfki.uni-kl.de/rada/
The dataset release is accompanied by an article publication at the Sensors journal:
On Thursday, October 27th, 2022, Mohamed Selim successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Deep Learning-based Head Orientation and Gender Estimation from Face Image” in front of the the PhD committee consisting of Prof. Dr. Didier Stricker (TU Kaiserslautern), Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns (TU Kaiserslautern), and Prof Dr. Stefan Deßloch (TU Kaiserslautern).
In the thesis, Mohamed Selim studied the problem of gender and head orientation estimation from face images. Machine-based perception can be of great benefit in extracting that underlying information in face images if the problem is properly modeled. In his thesis, novel solutions are provided to the problems of head orientation estimation and gender prediction. Moreover, the effect of facial appearance changes due to head orientation variation has been investigated on gender prediction accuracy. A novel orientation-guided feature maps recalibration method is presented, that significantly increased the accuracy of gender prediction.
Mohamed Selim received his bachelor and master’s degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the German University in Cairo, Egypt. He joined the Augmented Vision department in October 2012, as a PhD candidate, and later in March 2018 as a researcher working on industrial and EU research projects. His research interests include computer vision, 3D reconstruction, and deep learning.
Mr. Selim after his successful PhD defense
A week later, on Friday, November 4th, 2022, MSc. Ing. Hammad Tanveer Butt also successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Improved Sensor Fusion and Deep Learning of 3D Human Pose From Sparse Magnetic Inertial Measurement Units” in front of the PhD committee consisting of Prof. Dr. Didier Stricker (TU Kaiserslautern and DFKI), Prof. Dr. Imran Shafi (National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan) and Prof. Dr. Jörg Dörr (TU Kaiserslautern and IESE Fraunhofer).
The goal of the thesis was to obtain a magnetometer robust 3D human body pose from sparse magnetic inertial motion sensors with uncertainty prediction employing Bayesian Deep learning. To this end, a systematic approach was adopted to address all the challenges of inertial motion capture in an end to end manner. First, simultaneous calibration of multiple magnetic inertial sensors was achieved with error mitigation and residual uncertainty learning. Then a magnetometer robust sensor fusion algorithm for 3D orientation was proposed. Adaptive anatomical error correction was used to reduce long term drift in the joint angles.
Also joint angle constraints were learned using a data driven approach while employing swing-twist formulation for 3D joint rotations. Finally, the thesis showed that Bayesian deep learning framework can be used to learn 3D human pose from sparse magnetic inertial sensors while also predicting the uncertainty of pose estimation which is well correlated with actual error and lack of information, particularly when the yaw angle derived from magnetometer is not used. The thesis led to two peer-reviewed contributions in IEEE Access Journal, as well as a best scientific paper award in IntelliSys-2019 Conference held at UK. The conference paper on swing-twist learning of joint constraints presented in Machine Vision Applications (MVA)-2019, Tokyo Japan was later invited by the reviewing committee amongst top-candidates to be published as a journal paper (extended version). A conference paper and a poster by the author were also accepted at FUSION-2019 Conference held at Ottawa, Canada.
MSc. Ing. Hammad Tanveer Butt received his Bachelors in Avionics (1999) and Master degree in Electrical Engineering (2013) from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) Pakistan, respectively. From 2016-2021, he worked at the Augmented Vision (AV) group DFKI as a researcher, while pursuing his PhD. His research interests include nano-electronics, MEMS sensors, deep learning/AI and quantum machine learning.
