Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

European project HUMAVIPS.

The European project HUMAVIPS – Humanoids with Auditory and Visual Abilities in Populated Spaces – is a 36-month FP7 STREP project coordinated by Radu Horaud and which started in 2010. The project addressed multimodal perception and cognitive issues associated with the computational development of a social robot. The objective was 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. Research and technological developments emphasized the role played by multimodal perception within principled models of human-robot interaction and of humanoid behavior. The HUMAVIPS project was successfully terminated in January 2013.

An article about Integrating Smart Robots into Society refers to HUMAVIPS. The article stresses the role of cognition in human-robot interaction and refers to HUMAVIPS as one of the FP7 projects that has paved the way towards the concept of audio-visual robotics. The article was published in HORIZON , which is Europe's Research & Innovation Magazine.

ERC Advanced Grant VHIA.

The PERCEPTION team is pleased to announce that Radu Horaud was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his project “Vision and Hearing in Action” (VHIA). This five year project (2014-2019) will develop the concept of social robots.

Best Paper Award at IEEE MMSP'13.

The article received the “Best Paper Award” at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP'13), Pula, Italy, September-October 2013. The paper addresses the problem of aligning visual and auditory data using a sensor that is composed of a camera-pair and a microphone-pair. The original contribution of the paper is a method for audio-visual data aligning through estimation of the 3D positions of the microphones in the visual centred coordinate frame defined by the stereo camera-pair. Please consult http://www.mmsp2013.org/mmsp2013_awards.php and [24] .

Best Paper Award :

[24] Alignment of Binocular-Binaural Data Using a Moving Audio-Visual Target in MMSP 2013 - IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing.

V. Khalidov, F. Forbes, R. Horaud.