Please check out the article “Artificial intelligence for a safe and sustainable construction industry (dfki.de)” concerning the new EU project HumanTech which is coordinated by Dr. Jason Rambach, head of the Spatial Sensing and Machine Perception team (Augmented Reality/Augmented Vision department, Prof. Didier Stricker) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern.
News
We are happy to announce that our paper titled
Deep Orientation-Guided Gender Recognition from Face Images
Mohamed Selim, Stephan Krauß, Tewodros Amberbir Habtegebrial, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker
has been accepted and presented (online) at the 12th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Systems, ICPRS-2022.
In this paper, we present a novel deep learning-based method to predict gender using both the face image and the head orientation angles. We show that the use of head orientation information consistently boosts the accuracy of gender prediction models. We achieve this by increasing the representational power of deep neural networks by introducing a head orientation adapter.
The INFINITY consortium had a successful technical meeting in preparation of the upcoming pilot in Sheffield, UK on July 5th, 2022.
The EU project INFINITY aim at delivering an integrated solution for data-driven criminal investigations, synthesising the latest innovations in virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning with big data and visual analytics. The result of the project will be a platform for collaborative work between Law Enforcement Agencies, where teamwork will be facilitated in virtual spaces and supported by AI-based data analytics.
DFKI is partnering with 19 partners to deliver an innovative solution. DFKI is working on virtual representations and avatars systems, and on an AI-based assistant to help investigation work.
More information: https://h2020-infinity.eu/
Contact: Dr. Alain Pagani
DFKI Augmented Vision had a strong presence in the recent CVPR 2022 Conference held on June 19th-23rd, 2022, in New Orleans, USA. The IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) is the premier annual computer vision event internationally. Homepage: https://cvpr2022.thecvf.com/ .
Overall, three publications were presented:
1. ZebraPose: Coarse to Fine Surface Encoding for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation
Yongzhi Su, Mahdi Saleh, Torben Fetzer, Jason Raphael Rambach, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam, Didier Stricker, Federico Tombari
2. SOMSI: Spherical Novel View Synthesis with Soft Occlusion Multi-Sphere Images Tewodros A Habtegebrial, Christiano Gava, Marcel Rogge, Didier Stricker, Varun Jampani
3. Unsupervised Anomaly Detection from Time-of-Flight Depth Images
Pascal Schneider, Jason Rambach, Bruno Mirbach , Didier Stricker
On June 14th, 2022, Dr. Jason Rambach gave a keynote talk in the Computer Vision session of the Franco-German Research and Innovation Network event held at the Inria headquarters in Versailles, Paris, France. In the talk, an overview of the current activities of the Spatial Sensing and Machine Perception team at DFKI Augmented Vision was presented.
The project MOVEON has been presented by Dr. Alain Pagani (DFKI) and Romain Boisseau (INRIA) at the 6th edition of the Viva Technology fair in Paris on June 17th, 2022.
Viva Technology, or VivaTech, is an annual technology conference, dedicated to innovation and startups, held in Paris, France. This year, France and Germany have been showcasing their future European digital champions on a single stand: the French-German Tech Lab. This Lab, organized by twelve French and German partners, highlights the most promising startups in their ecosystems, as well as the concrete academic and economic cooperation between the two countries.
MOVEON is a common project between DFKI and INRIA, and is aiming to develop a new generation of visual positioning algorithms that will enable geometric reasoning to be carried out on high-level primitives taken from learning.
More information: https://www.dfki.de/web/forschung/projekte-publikationen/projekte-uebersicht/projekt/moveon
Contact: Dr. Alain Pagani
The EU project INFINITY has concluded its first in-person project meeting in Vienna on April 13th, 2022. This meeting was the occasion for the end user partners to try out the updated VR demos.
INFINITY aims at delivering an integrated solution for data-driven criminal investigations, synthesising the latest innovations in virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning with big data and visual analytics. The result of the project will be a platform for collaborative work between Law Enforcement Agencies, where teamwork will be facilitated in virtual spaces and supported by AI-based data analytics.
More information: https://h2020-infinity.eu/
Contact: Dr. Alain Pagani
Artificial intelligence (AI) is serving an increasingly significant role in many workplaces — one that continues to grow as new developments in AI and surrounding technologies become available. This leads us to think about how such technologies can be and should be used to empower humans. In this article, Tomokazu Murakami from the Research & Development Group of Hitachi, Ltd. sat down with Didier Stricker, Head of the Augmented Reality Research Department at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) to discuss the use of AI in the workplace, its benefits and challenges, human-AI collaboration and its impact on workers.
Check out the full interview “Insights from AI/Analytics: Human-AI collaboration in the industrial sector: what does the future hold?”.
On March 18th, 2022, René Schuster successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Data-driven and Sparse-to-Dense Concepts in Scene Flow Estimation for Automotive Applications”. The reviewers were Prof. Dr. Didier Stricker (Technical University of Kaiserslautern) and Prof. Dr. Andrés Bruhn (University of Stuttgart). Mr. Schuster received his doctorate from the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern.
In his thesis, Mr. Schuster worked on three-dimensional motion estimation of the dynamic environment of vehicles. The focus was on machine learning methods, and the interpolation of individual estimates into a dense motion field. A particular challenge was the scarcity of annotated data for this problem and use case.
René Schuster received an M. Sc. in computational engineering from Darmstadt University of Technology in 2017. He then moved to DFKI to join the augmented reality group of Prof. Stricker. Much of his research was done in collaborative projects with BMW.
On March 18th, 2022, we had the great privilege to demonstrate the BIONIC system to the German chancelor Olaf Scholz during his visit to DFKI GmbH in Kaiserslautern. Dr. Markus Miezal was wearing the BIONIC system on a workstation and presented the real-time ergonomic assessment.
The system consists of work pants and a shirt, which carry inertial measurement units similar to those in a smartphone. Using sensor fusion methods, the body posture of the worker can be extracted to monitor the health of the worker and allows to give feedback, either direct, if the working posture is hazardous or via statistics gathered throughout a workday. Since privacy is a main topic of this project, the data is processed on a small wearable device, similar to a smartphone, so that the personal data literally stays on the person in the first place. Under premise of the workers approval, the data might be shared with his doctor, so that he can make recommendations on exercises according to this phyiscal stress during work. In a further step, the worker might even donate anonymized data to his employer, which allows him to analyze the general ergonomy of the workstation itself.
The chancellor was interested on how long and when to wear the system. Indeed, the system is not meant for every-day use but can be beneficial during training on a new workstation, where new work processes are learnt in an ergonomically sound way. Meanwhile the project has finished, however, spin-offs, e.g. the sci-track GmbH, will continue to provide the technology to the market.
For more information, please check out the following links:
DFKI – BIONIC Video on YouTube (3 minutes, 8 seconds)
DFKI + TUK – Tech Demonstrator (1 minute, 47 seconds)
DFKI Press Release: BUNDESKANZLER OLAF SCHOLZ BESUCHT DAS DFKI
