Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

1. Organisation of the Workshop on Biological and Computer Vision Interfaces in Firenze October 12, 2012, held in conjunction with ECCV 2012. This workshop was organised by Olivier Faugeras and Pierre Kornprobst. This workshop was a one-day event with prestigious invited speakers discussing several aspects of biological and computer vision interfaces, namely biological vision, mathematical and computational paradigms for biological and human vision, computational and hardware models of the visual brain and bio-inspired methods for computer vision. More information is available at http://www-sop.inria.fr/manifestations/wbcvi2012/index.shtml

2. Organisation of the workshop NeuroComp/KEOpS’12, Bordeaux, 10-11 October 2012. This workshop was joinly organized by F. Alexandre and T. Viéville (Mnemosyne), B. Cessac (Neuromathcomp), A. Palacios and M.J. Escobar (CN Valparaiso). It addressed the following issues (i) neural population dynamics and coding; (ii) architecture (and information flow) at the retinal and the brain level. The workshop was a two days event involving speakers in the field of vision and cognition, robotics, retina healthcare and prosthesis, and dynamical systems modeling. More information is available at http://neurocomp.risc.cnrs.fr/neurocomp-2012/index.php?page=1 .

3. European Union project “MATHEMACS” accepted. The MATHEMACS project aims to develop a mathematical theory of complex multi-level systems and their dynamics. This is done through a general formulation based on the mathematical tools of information and dynamical systems theories. To ensure that the theoretical framework is at the same time practically applicable, three key application areas are represented within the project, namely neurobiology, human communication, and economics. These areas not only provide some of the best-known epitomes of complex multi-level systems, but also constitute a challenging test bed for validating the generality of the theory since they span a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. Furthermore, they have an important common aspect; namely, their complexity and self-organizational character is partly due to the anticipatory and predictive actions of their constituent units. The MATHEMACS project contends that the concepts of anticipation and prediction are particularly relevant for multi-level systems since they often involve different levels. Thus, as a further unique feature, the project includes the mathematical representation and modeling of anticipation in its agenda for understanding complex multi-level systems.

4. European Union project “RENVISION” accepted. RENVISION’s goal is twofold: i) to achieve a comprehensive understanding of how the retina encodes visual information through the different cellular layers; ii) to use such insights to develop a retina-inspired computational approach to high-level computer vision tasks. By exploiting the integration of recent advances in high-resolution light microscopy, 3D imaging and high-density multielectrode array technologies, RENVISION will be in an unprecedented position to investigate pan-retinal signal processing at high spatiotemporal resolution, allowing simultaneous recording from the entire population of ganglion cells and functional imaging of inner retinal layers at near-cellular resolution, combined with 3D structural imaging of the whole inner retina. The combined analysis of these complex datasets will require the development of novel multimodal analysis methods. Resting on these neuroscientific and computational grounds, RENVISION will generate new knowledge on retinal processing. It will provide advanced pattern recognition and machine learning technologies to ICTs by shedding a new light on how the output of retinal processing (natural, modelled) solves complex vision tasks such as automated scene categorization and action recognition.