News

Our paper “G3FA: Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation” was presented at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2024 by Alireza Javanmardi from the Augmented Vision Department DFKI!

The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) is one of the major international conferences on computer vision and related areas and is organised by the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA). This year it was held in Glasgow from November 25^th to 28^th.

Our work presents a method for real-time face re-enactment from one single source image and addresses a key limitation of GAN-based face animation: geometric consistency.

G3FA enhances realism, especially in challenging head poses, by:

• Utilizing implicit 3D supervision through inverse rendering to extract depth and normal maps from 2D images, guiding the generator towards greater accuracy.
• Employing an ensemble of discriminators to incorporate the 3D properties, improving the generator’s understanding of human head structure.
• Leveraging face volume rendering with orthogonal ray sampling and volume rendering for high-quality image synthesis.

Check out the paper:

G3FA: Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation, Alireza Javanmardi, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2024

Link to the paper

Code is available at github.com/dfki-av/G3FA

Contact: Alireza Javanmardi, Alain Pagani

The Network of Excellence dAIEDGE co-organized the  European Conference on EDGE AI Technologies and Applications (EEAI 2024) in Cagliary, Italy on October 21-23, 2024.

Over the three days, more than 50 presenters took part in 12 keynotes and parallel sessions, addressing more than 20 topics, where participants discussed how Edge AI is redefining the future of technological applications and systems.

dAIEDGE Partners contributed to the EEAI programme with presentations that offered a practical and innovative view of Edge AI in action, highlighting its transformative potential in sectors such as sustainability, energy and security:

FPGA Acceleration for SAR Imagery-Based Sea Ice Mapping: This presentation, by Rashed Al Koutayni (DFKI), addressed the use of FPGA accelerators to improve the speed and accuracy of sea ice mapping using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery.

Functional and Non-Functional Requirements in Edge AI Systems: Ovidiu Vermesan (SINTEF, Norway) and Alain Pagani (DFKI, Germany) discussed the challenges associated with functional and non-functional requirements in Edge AI systems, addressing both operational needs and ethical and legal constraints.

Legal Requirements for Trustworthy Edge AI: Lydia Belkadi from KU Leuven addressed the regulations needed to ensure trustworthy edge AI solutions

The event allowed participants not only to learn from leading experts, but also to network and connect with the best in the industry, strengthening a community of experts and practitioners who are driving innovation in Edge AI.

Coordinator: Dr. Alain Pagani

Project Manager: Dr. Mohamed Selim

The researchers of the Augmented Vision department presented their latest research activities in the field of eXtended Reality at the EuroXR conference in Athens, from November 27^th to 29^th, 2024.

The European Association for eXtended Reality (EuroXR) Conference is the ultimate gathering for Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). This year, the conference was co-organized by the Institute of Communication and Computer System (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

This year, a joint event on Next Generation XR was co-organized by six European Projects, among them CORTEX2, LUMINOUS and SHARESPACE, all coordinated by the Augmented Vision department at DFKI.

• Alain Pagani presented the recent work on cooperative telepresence in the project CORTEX2
• Michael Lorenz talked about social XR in SHARESPACE
• Zeshan Afzal featured the use of language models for XR in the project LUMINOUS

The coordinators took part in a panel discussion about the “Future of XR”, in which they could share their view about the next steps in XR research and development.

In addition, the AV group presented two application papers and one demonstrator, which attracted the interest of the conference participants

• “Augmented telecommunication in factory setting”, Narek Minaskan, Bastian Krayer, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, EuroXR 2024
• “AR Assistant for Pruning of Grapevines and Fruit Trees”, Mariia Podguzova, Simon Haering, Jamiu Ojeleye, Stephan Krauss, Didier Stricker, EuroXR 2024
• “Industrial remote cooperation (Demo)”, Bastian Krayer, Narek Minaskan, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker, EuroXR

The paper “AR Assistant for Pruning of Grapevines and Fruit Trees” won the EuroXR 2024 Best Application Paper award – Congratulations to the authors!

 
Contact: Dr. Alain Pagani

The Network of Excellence dAIEDGE held its General Assembly meeting on September 5^th and 6th, looking back at the achievements of the last 12 months, and preparing the next steps of the network! It’s been two days full of inspiration and breakthroughs in Heraklion, Crete!

The 36 dAIEDGE partners gathered to share achievements and define the roadmap towards our big goal: To make Europe a world leader in AI and data economy!

During this event, we reinforced our strategic partnerships and strengthened our joint commitment to take technological innovation to another level.

A big thank to our partner ICS-FORTH for being exceptional hosts and making this assembly an unforgettable experience.

We continue to move forward together towards a bright future of innovation and growth!

Coordinator: Dr. Alain Pagani

Project Manager : Dr. Mohamed Selim

The 4^th IEEE Workshop On AI Hardware: Test, Reliability And Security (AI-TREATS) held on May 23^th and 24^th 2024 was a great success!

The event, co-located with the 29th IEEE European Test Symposium, explored the recent advances in edge AI under the aspects of security, trust and testing. The workshop gathered many researchers with 15 presented papers, and a keynote by Prof. Yanjing Li (University of Chicago, USA).

On the opening day, Alain Pagani participated to a Panel Discussion about Networks of Excellence on Edge AI in Europe. Together with Mateo Sonza Reorda (Politecnico di Torino Italy, FAIR project) and Ovidiu Vermesan (SINTEF, Norway, EdgeAI project), he could present dAIEDGE  and the main aspects of the Network of Excellence on Edge AI.

The workshop chaired by Annachiara Ruospo (Politecnico di Torino, Italy) and Haralampos Stratigopoulos (Sorbonne Universtié, France) was co-sponsored and co-organised by FAIR, dAIEDGE and EdgeAI

Many thanks to the all participants!

We are proud to announce that the researchers of the department Augmented Vision will present 6 papers at the upcoming CVPR conference taking place Mon Jun 17th through Fri Jun 21st, 2024 at the Seattle Convention Center, Seattle, USA.

The CVPR conference is the premier international conference in computer vision and pattern recognition.

The 6 papers are:

MiKASA: Multi-Key-Anchor Scene-Aware Transformer for 3D Visual Grounding
Chun-Peng Chang, Shaoxiang Wang, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker

HiPose: Hierarchical Binary Surface Encoding and Correspondence Pruning for RGB-D 6DoF Object Pose Estimation
Yongliang Lin, Yongzhi Su, Praveen Nathan, Sandeep Inuganti, Yan Di, Martin Sundermeyer, Fabian Manhardt, Didier Stricker, Jason Rambach, Yu Zhang

SG-PGM: Partial Graph Matching Network with Semantic Geometric Fusion for 3D Scene Graph Alignment and Its Downstream Tasks
Yaxu Xie, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker

Sparse Semi-Detr: Sparse Learnable Queries for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal

CAD-SIGNet: CAD Language Inference from Point Clouds using Layer-wise Sketch Instance Guided Attention
Mohammad Sadil Khan, Elona Dupont, Sk Aziz Ali, Kseniya Cherenkova, Anis Kacem, Djamila Aouada

EventEgo3D: 3D Human Motion Capture from Egocentric Event Streams
Christen Millerdurai, Hiroyasu Akada, Jian Wang, Diogo Luvizon, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik

Congratulations to the authors for this great achievement!

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 4^th -8^th January 2024 in Waikoloa, Hawaii.

Homepage: https://wacv2024.thecvf.com/   

The 2 accepted papers are:

1. Single Frame Semantic Segmentation Using Multi-Modal Spherical Images
   • Suresh Guttikonda, Jason Raphael Rambach
2. SphereCraft: A Dataset for Spherical Keypoint Detection, Matching and Camera Pose Estimation
   • Christiano Couto Gava, Yunmin Cho, Federico Raue, Sebastian Palacio, Alain Pagani, Andreas Dengel

Contact: Dr. Jason Rambach, Dr. Alain Pagani