PERCEPTION News

Master projects for the academic year 2012-2013

2012-09-30T13:59:49Z

The PERCEPTION team is seeking four master students to work on the projects listed below. The projects can start any time between January 2013 and July 2013. The duration of each project is 4-6 months. Please contact Radu Horaud for more information.

List of Master projects:

Piece-wise decomposition of a depth map into planes for robot locomotion

Continuous Gesture Recognition from Stereo for Humanoid Robot

Human-robot interaction using faces, sound localization and voice recognition

Understanding gestures: robust audio-visual learning on the humanoid robot NAO

An article about our work on social robots (in French)

2012-09-05T22:00:00Z

Lors d'un cocktail, une personne dialogue avec un petit groupe. Soudain, c'est � vous qu'elle s'adresse. Vous engagez la conversation. Facile ? Des millions d'ann�es d'�volution ont pourtant �t� n�cessaires pour que votre cerveau adopte ce comportement social basique ! Ce probl�me d'attention s�lective est appel� � cocktail party effect � par les psychologues. Le r�soudre est un point d�cisif pour que des robots interagissent avec les humains.

Book on Time-of-flight cameras published by Springer

2012-08-28T22:00:00Z

This book describes a variety of recent research into time-of-flight imaging. Time-of-flight cameras are used to estimate 3D scene-structure directly, in a way that complements traditional multiple-view reconstruction methods. The first two chapters of the book explain the underlying measurement principle, and examine the associated sources of error and ambiguity. Chapters three and four are concerned with the geometric calibration of time-of-flight cameras, particularly when used in combination with ordinary colour cameras. The final chapter shows how to use time-of-flight data in conjunction with traditional stereo matching techniques. The five chapters, together, describe a complete depth and colour 3D reconstruction pipeline. This book will be useful to new researchers in the field of depth imaging, as well as to those who are working on systems that combine colour and time-of-flight cameras.

The book's bibtex reference.

Outstanding paper award at ICMI'11

2011-11-16T17:33:56Z

Our article "Finding Audio-Visual Events in Informal Social Gatherings" received the "Outstanding Paper Award" (best paper) at the IEEE/ACM 13th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI'11), Alicante, Spain, November 2011. The paper is authored by Xavi Alameda-Pineda, Vasil Khalidov, Radu Horaud and Florence Forbes.

The paper addresses the problem of detecting and localizing audio-visual events (such as people) in a complex/cluttered scenario such as a cocktail party. The work is carried out within the collaborative European project HUMAVIPS .

New European project granted to PERCEPTION and MISTIS

2010-02-11T23:00:00Z

The PERCEPTION (vision) and MISTIS (statistics) teams at INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes, together with four other partners, have just been granted a new European project under the FP7-ICT Cognitive Systems and Robotics, the HUMAVIPS project: Humanoids with Auditory and Visual Abilities in Populated Spaces.

Abstract: Humanoids expected to collaborate with people should be able to interact with them in the most natural way. This involves significant perceptual, communication, and motor processes, operating in a coordinated fashion. Consider a social gathering scenario where a humanoid is expected to possess certain social skills. It should be able to explore a populated space, to localize people and to determine their status, to decide to join one or two persons, to synthetize appropriate behavior, and to engage in dialog with them. Humans appear to solve these tasks routinely by integrating the often complementary information provided by multi sensory data processing, from low-level 3D object positioning to high-level gesture recognition and dialog handling. Understanding the world from unrestricted sensorial data, recognizing people's intentions and behaving like them are extremely challenging problems. The objective of HUMAVIPS is to endow humanoid robots with audiovisual (AV) abilities: exploration, recognition, and interaction, such that they exhibit adequate behavior when dealing with a group of people. Proposed research and technological developments will emphasize the role played by multimodal perception within principled models of human-robot interaction and of humanoid behavior. An adequate architecture will implement auditory and visual skills onto a fully programmable humanoid robot. An open-source software platform will be developed to foster dissemination and to ensure exploitation beyond the lifetime of the project.

Website: http://humavips.inrialpes.fr

Partners: INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes (France, coordinator), The Czech Technical University in Prague (Czech Republic), Aldebaran Robotics (France), IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland), and Bielefeld University (Germany).

Project duration: 1 February 2010 to 31 January 2013 (36 mohths)

Project budget: 3,432,000 euros

European funding: 2,636,000 euros

Robotic perception, on purpose

2009-12-09T23:00:00Z

A short article about the European POP project, coordinated by Radu Horaud, appeared in ICT results.

The article was also published by ScienceDaily.

See also a shorter article published by wired.co.uk

Workshop on computational and biological models for auditory, vision, and their interactions

2008-12-11T23:00:00Z

Workshop organized in conjunction with the European project POP (Perception on Purpose)

CRS Industrial Prize awarded at BMVC'08

2008-09-08T08:50:49Z

The CRS Industrial Prize, sponsored by Computer Recognition Systems, was awarded to:

Ama�l Delaunoy, Emmanuel Prados, Pau Gargallo, Jean-Philippe Pons and Peter Sturm

for their paper entitled:

Minimizing the Multi-view Stereo Reprojection Error for Triangular Surface Meshes

Paper presented at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC'08), Leeds, UK, September 2008.

Best paper award at the AMDO'08 conference

2008-07-30T10:21:27Z

The paper Inverse Kinematics using Sequential Monte Carlo Methods by Elise Arnaud and co-author Nicolas Courty received the best paper award and AMDO'08 (Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects).

An interview with Richard Broadbridge, CEO of 4D View Solutions

2008-07-11T22:00:00Z

4D View Solutions is a start-up company created in October 2007 and which commercializes real-time 3D video software based on the multiple-camera 3D reconstruction technologies developed by the PERCEPTION group.