Section: Other Grants and Activities

Projects funded by the European Commission

iGlance (European project MEDEA 2008-2011)

iGlance aims at developing new free viewpoint capabilities for the next TV generation. 10 partners are involved in this project including: ST microelectronics (France), Philips research (Holland), the university of Eindhoven(Holland), 4D View solutions (France), INRIA (France), Silicon Hive (Holland), Logica (France), Task 24 (Holland), Verum (Holland), Tima (France).

FP6/Marie-Curie RTN VISIONTRAIN

VISIONTRAIN is a 4 year Marie Curie Research Training Network, or RTN (2005-2009) coordinated by Radu Horaud. This network gathers 11 partners from 11 European countries and has the ambition to address foundational issues in computational and cognitive vision systems through an European doctoral and post-doctoral program.

VISIONTRAIN addresses the problem of understanding vision from both computational and cognitive points of view. The research approach is based on formal mathematical models and on the thorough experimental validation of these models. We intend to reduce the gap that exists today between biological vision (which performs outstandingly well and fast but not yet understood) and computer vision (whose robustness, flexibility, and autonomy remain to be demonstrated). In order to achieve these ambitious goals, 11 internationally recognized academic partners work cooperatively on a number of targeted research topics: computational theories and methods for low-level vision, motion understanding from image sequences, learning and recognition of shapes, categories, and actions, cognitive modelling of the action of seeing, and functional imaging for observing and modelling brain activity. There are three categories of researchers involved in this network: doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers, as well as highly experienced researchers. The work includes participation to proof-of-concept achievements, annual thematic schools, industrial meetings, attendance of conferences, etc.

FP6 IST STREP project POP

We are coordinators of the POP project (Perception on Purpose) involving the MISTIS and the PERCEPTION INRIA groups, as well as 4 other partners: University of Osnabruck (cognitive neuroscience), University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (neurophysiology), University of Coimbra (robotics), and University of Sheffield (hearing and speech). POP proposes the development of a fundamentally new approach, perception on purpose, which is based on 5 principles. First, visual and auditory information should be integrated in both space and time. Second, active exploration of the environment is required to improve the audiovisual signal-to-noise ratio. Third, the enormous potential sensory requirements of the entire input array should be rendered manageable by multimodal models of attentional processes. Fourth, bottom-up perception should be stabilized by top-down cognitive function and lead to purposeful action. Finally, all parts of the system should be underpinned by rigorous mathematical theory, from physical models of low-level binocular and binaural sensory processing to trainable probabilistic models of audiovisual scenes.