Section: Other Grants and Activities
Europe
SEARISE: Smart Eyes, Attending and Recognizing Instances of Salient Events
Participants : Neil Bruce, Olivier Faugeras, Pierre Kornprobst, Emilien Tlapale.
SEARISE is a three-year project started in March 2008. It involves the following academic partners: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Germany), University of Genoa (Italy), Ulm University (Germany) University of Bangor (Wales). Two industrial partners are also involved: TrackMen Ltd. and LTU Arena.
The SEARISE project develops a trinocular active cognitive vision system, the Smart-Eyes, for detection, tracking and categorization of salient events and behaviours. Unlike other approaches in video surveillance, the system will have human-like capability to learn continuously from the visual input, self-adjust to ever changing visual environment, fixate salient events and follow their motion, categorize salient events dependent on the context. Inspired by the human visual system, a cyclopean camera will perform wide range monitoring of the visual field while active binocular stereo cameras will fixate and track salient objects, mimicking a focus of attention that switches between different interesting locations.
The core of this artificial cognitive visual system will be a dynamic hierarchical neural architecture – a computational model of visual processing in the brain. Information processing in Smart-Eyes will be highly efficient due to a multi-scale design: Controlled by the cortically plausible neural model, the active cameras will provide a multi-scale video record of salient events. The processing will self-organize to adapt to scale variations and to assign the majority of computational resources to the informative parts of the scene.
The Smart-Eyes system will be tested in real-life scenarios featuring the activity of people in different scales. In a long-range distance scenario, the system will be monitoring crowd behaviour of sport fans in a football arena. In a short range scenario, the system will be monitoring the behaviour of small groups of people and single individuals. The system’s capability for self-adaptation will be specifically demonstrated and quantified compared to systems with ‘classical’ architecture that are trained once and then used on a set of test scenes.
Website: http://www.searise.eu/web/doku.php
FACETS : Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States
Participants : Romain Brette, Maria-Jose Escobar, Olivier Faugeras, Mathieu Galtier, François Grimbert, Horacio Rostro-Gonzalez, Pierre Kornprobst, Théo Papadopoulo, Emilien Tlapale, Jonathan Touboul, Romain Veltz.
FACETS is an integrated project within the biologically inspired information systems branch of IST-FET. The FACETS project aims to address, with a concerted action of neuroscientists, computer scientists, engineers and physicists, the unsolved question of how the brain computes. It combines a substantial fraction of the European groups working in the field into a consortium of 13 groups from Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. About 80 scientists will join their efforts over a period of 4 years, starting in September 2005. A project of this dimension has rarely been carried out in the context of brain-science related work in Europe, in particular with such a strong interdisciplinary component.
Website: http://facets.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/
ERC NERVI
Participants : Bruno Cessac, Pascal Chossat [ CNRS ] , Olivier Faugeras, Pierre Kornprobst.
Olivier Faugeras responded to the 2008 ERC call “IDEAS”. His project, NerVi, submitted to the “Mathematics and Interfaces” panel, has been accepted and obtained a 5 years funding for a total amount of 1.7 Million Euros.
The project is to develop a formal model of information representation and processing in the part of the neocortex that is mostly concerned with visual information. This model will open new horizons in a well-principled way in the fields of artificial and biological vision as well as in computational neuroscience. Specifically the goal is to develop a universally accepted formal framework for describing complex, distributed and hierarchical processes capable of processing seamlessly a continuous flow of images. This framework features notably computational units operating at several spatiotemporal scales on stochastic data arising from natural images. Mean- field theory and stochastic calculus are used to harness the fundamental stochastic nature of the data, functional analysis and bifurcation theory to map the complexity of the behaviours of these assemblies of units. In the absence of such foundations the development of an understanding of visual information processing in man and machines could be greatly hindered. Although the proposal addresses fundamental problems its goal is to serve as the basis for ground-breaking future computational development for managing visual data and as a theoretical framework for a scientific understanding of biological vision.
