Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry
European and National Projects
3D Live
Participants: Frédéric Devernay - CR Matthieu Volat - Engineer Sylvain Duchne - Engineer Adrian Ramos - Masters Student
3Dlive is a collaborative project, supported by French Ministry of Industry, and involving 3 industry and research clusters: "Images et Réseaux" (Brittany and The Loire Valley), "Imaginove" (Rh™ne-Alpes), "Cap Digital" (Paris).
There are eight partners . R&D/industry: France Télécom Orange (project leader), Thomson R&D France (3D R&D), Thomson Grass Valley France (cameras , encoders), Thales Angénieux (optics). Small companies: AMP (TV shooting), Binocle (specific 3D HW & SW manufacturer). University labs: INRIA/PRIMA, Institut Telecom.
The objectives of this project are to create expertise in France for the live filming and transmission of 3D stereo contents, and to help French industry and universities to be major global 3D actors.
The role of PRIMA within this project is to develop new algorithms for real-time processing of stereoscopic video streams. This includes: - stereoscopic video rectification and geometric adjustments. - view interpolation, and extraction of stereoscopic metadata for the adaptation of the stereoscopic content to the projection screen.
These algorithms rely on view- and scale- invariant feature extraction, feature matching, dense stereoscopic reconstruction, and computer graphics techniques (matting, and accelerated processing and rendering using the GPU).
ANR Project CASPER: Communication, Activity Analysis and Ambient Assistance for Senior PERsons
Start Date: 1 Jan 2007
Duration: 36 months
The consortium consists of INRIA Rhone Alpes, France Telecom R&D and H2AD.
The CASPER project will develop new technologies to respond directly to the increasingly urgent social problem of care for elderly persons. A complementary target group of persons with cognitive deficiencies, including persons with early forms of Alzheimer disease and brain-injured people will also be addressed.
We propose to create a family of devices that provide monitoring services as well as a sense of "presence" between elderly people or people with cognitive deficiencies on the one hand, their family or friends, volunteer helpers of health care professionals on the other hand. The proposed family of devices will consist of a “mother station” assisted by a number of satellite devices for specialised sensing services. The mother station and satellite sensors form a wireless sensor network that uses machine-learning techniques to collectively construct and maintain a model of daily activity. The devices will use "ambient" communication technologies (lights, sounds, movements, vibration) to interact in a familiar, simple and unobtrusive way with their users, and to communicate a sense of presence between elderly people, their family and health care service providers.
The devices will embed and combine visual, acoustic and tactile sensor modalities for observing the daily patterns of activity. Mother stations will embed a panoramic camera, microphones, tactile sensor and bio-metric sensors to note movements, activities and physiological parameters of its owner. The wireless satellite devices will provide specialised sensing to recognize specific classes of domestic activity. For example they may use acoustic sensing to recognize "water sounds" (e.g. shower, bath, basin etc), kitchen sounds (cooking, washing or manipulating food packages), and living room sounds (telephone, TV, Radio or visitors). Incremental machine learning will be used to refine and adapt pre-learned recognition procedures to ambient sounds.
The system will not record images or sound (unless instructed to), but will use embedded real-time machine perception and pattern recognition to recognize classes of activities and organise an activity log. The mother station will maintain a journal of daily activities organised according to location and time, where location will be in the form of topologically associated spatio-temporal map that devices infer from sensor observations. Activity will be recorded as a series of situations organised using 24 hour and 7 day cycles. The activity log can be used to provide un-intrusive "presence" information for family members, as well as more detailed records for health care professionals. Comparison of current activity to a statistical summary of the activity log can be used to sense unusual situations requiring intervention.
The result of this project will be a new technological approach to assist elderly and brain-injured people in maintaining independent living and social interaction. The overall aim of this project is to demonstrate the required technology, and to understand its user requirements and its social implications.
The project will make key contributions to progress beyond the state of the art. These include:
-
A new approach to provision of care, assistance, social interaction and social connectedness to older people living independently, combining traditional monitoring with high-level detection of situations, activities, and activity patterns
-
Advances in perceptual technologies, affective computing, ambient system design, and sensor networks that will be generic and relevant beyond the use for healthcare monitoring.
The impact of the proposed technologies goes beyond the problem of independent living, health and well being of the elderly. These technologies can stimulate emergence of new commercial industries in a number of areas. For example, affective interaction is expected to provide a major impact on the way that people interact with information technology. Such technology may mark a rupture point in the evolution of informatics and the start in an exponential growth in new applications across a broad spectrum.
OSEO Project MinImage: Embedded Integrated Vision Systems
Start Date: 1 march 2008
Duration: 60 months
The consortium consists of - STMicroelectronics - Saint-Gobain Recherche - CEA-LETI and LIST - Varioptic - INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes Research Centre - DxO
The goal of the MinImage project is to develop integrated micro-cameras for portable telephones. This is a 141 Million Euro development program provided with 70 Million Euros of Aide by OSEO/AII. The program includes major development efforts in micro-electronics, optics, image processing, and image analysis.
