CeRV at ICPR 2016

Dr Stommel Received The Best Paper Award of IVCNZ 2016

Dr Martin Stommel received the best paper award of IVCNZ 2016 recently because of his first method to recognize microscopic optical markers known as ‘Snowflakes’. Dr Stommel is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Center for Robotics and Vision (CeRV) at the AUT.

CeRV members had six accepted papers at this years IVCNZ 2016. Johnny Chien also had an oral presentation, Dr. Minh Nguyen, Mahmoud Al-Sarayreh, Zahra Moayed, Noor Haitham Saleem, and Dr. Martin Stommel had also poster presentations. This is a continuation of excellent work from last year, when CeRV researchers Rafael Guillermo Gonzalez Acuña, Junli Tao and Reinhard Klette won the IVCNZ Best Poster Award.

IVCNZ is New Zealand’s premier conference for innovations in computer vision, image processing, visualisation and computer graphics. Usually, about half of the participants are international. This year, the IVCNZ was held on November 21–22 at Massey University, Palmerston North. The conference had 90 submissions and an acceptance rate of 60%.

The First CSC-Supported PhD Student at AUT

CeRV centre is celebrating the arrival of PhD student Qin Gu from Chengdu, China, whose one-year stay at CeRV has been sponsored by the CSC Council China. It is the first time that such a China national scholarship was received by a PhD student hosted at AUT. The student will be jointly supervised by Professor Yang from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), and Professor Klette at CeRV.

Autonomous Car Project in Collaboration with Wuhan University

The autonomous car project at CeRV received an essential input by having two PhD students, Hsiang-Jen (Johnny) Chien and Noor Saleem at Wuhan University for two months. This stay was fully financed by Wuhan University, including airfare and accommodation. The visited institute at Wuhan University has five cars equipped and tested for autonomous driving. Johnny and Noor introduced trinocular stereo vision into the group at Wuhan University, and received various research inputs in return. This appears to be a great start of a long-term collaboration between AUT and Wuhan University.

Paving the Way for Public Road Safety

Dr Xingle Feng, the Head of Department of Information Engineering from Chang’an University China, a Project 211 University in China,  is visiting the CeRV center for six months from August 2016 onward. On 22 September 2016, Professor Feng has fulfilled his talk at WT 515C  related to public road safety, the research project is profitable to public road surface quality especially paves the way for heavy and long vehicles under autonomous control.

A CeRV Visitor from Stanford University

Dr Zouhair Mahboubi  from Stanford University at Palo Alto California visited the CeRV Robotics Lab at AUT on 16 September 2016, after giving a seminar in building  WT related to semi-Markov decision processes (POSMDP). He informed how those have been applied to automated air traffic control. During his visit, Dr Mahboubi shew his interests in AUT’s projects related to autonomous vehicles, UAVs, and robotic systems. Dr Mahboubi received his MSc and PhD degrees both from Stanford University, and he is having an international research collaboration with New Zealand.

CeRV Visitors from Shandong Province China

CeRV Retreat

From 2 to 4 September 2016,  CeRV research center had a retreat at Whatipu lodge,  a group of historic buildings located at the south-western coastal corner of the Waitakere Ranges.  There have been eight research presentations in the fields of drone imaging, medical image analysis, robotics, computational geometry, computer vision, and intelligent surveillance. CeRV staff, visitors, students, and their families enjoyed a multidisciplinary research workshop, informative evening presentations, as well as walks through picturesque scenes of the Whatipu reserve, featuring extensive beaches, historic artifacts, caves, and the rain forest.

Analysing Visual Data from UAV System

The University UAV team in the past years has traversed the Southern hemisphere including the Antarctic Continent, Australasian and Africa, now carried back huge volume of footages for visual analysis. The analytics of these invaluable data will divulge visual secrets of this natural world such as vegetation, birds, whales, fairy circles, green turtles and other widelife. AUT CeRV center has embarked on image understanding throughout object detection, counting, tracking and recognition as well as stereo vision and 3D visual reconstructions.

Granted Proposal for External Research Funds

The proposal for solving problem of food security and assurance by using spectroscopic imaging technology has been granted recently. The research funds will be offered as a scholarship especially for PhD student training. The project will be jointly run between CeRV research centre and the agricultural research New Zealand. The early research work has been started up, the success of this three years project will lead to international collaborations between New Zealand, Australia, China, Chile and other countries.

The CeRVer Talks at Taiwan

From 8 to 12 August 2016, Professor Klette will enunciate his talks at National Kaohsiung University and National Ilan University, additionally a keynote speech will be articulated at the “International Symposium on Engineering” in Chia-Yi, Professor Klette will be an invited speaker at the panel for globalization in science of this international conference. All the addresses will be towards autonomous vehicles in computer vision and mathematical analysis.

Welcome IEEE AVSS 2018

The renowned international conference IEEE AVSS specified in video and signal surveillance will take its tour to the Southern hemisphere after the consecutive showcases in USA (Colorado Springs, 2016, see http://avss2016.org) and Europe (2017). This is the first time that this flagship conference in surveillance will touch down the scenic and prosperous city of sails in New Zealand. CeRV zealous volunteers will be ready to welcome and serve the conference participants from all over of the world.

Akira Nakamura Award 2016

The Akira Nakamura Award 2016 was bestowed to Mr Hsiang-Jen (Johnny) Chien, a CeRV PhD student at present, one of his papers has been accepted to the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2016, the main conference of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) which will take place this year in Cancun, Mexico.

Akira Nakamura, professor emeritus of Hiroshima University, provides an annual award of 30,000 Japanese Yen for CeRV research students who have been involved in computer vision projects at CeRV. This accolade goes to the student who is the first to forward Professor Klette (Director of CeRV) an email about an accepted paper (with being the leading author) at one of the leading annual computer vision conferences. If there is only a time difference of less than 1 hour between notifications, then the award is shared between notifying students.

In 2017, the awarded premise will be the conferences CVPR, ICCV, CAIP, and PSIVT (main conferences or workshops). In 2015, the award was crowned to Dongwei Liu, a PhD degree student of CeRV for an accepted paper at CAIP; in 2014, Mahdi Rezaei and Simon Hermann clinched the prize for their high-quality papers at CVPR, the premium to Ralf Haeusler in 2013 for his paper published at CVPR, to Ralf Haeusler in 2012 for an ECCV workshop paper, to Mahdi Rezaei in 2011 for a paper at CAIP, and to Simon Hermann and Konstantin Schauwecker in 2010 for papers at PSIVT of that year.

Spectroscopic Food Assurance

A promising project related to food security and assurance in use of digital image and video technology will be jointly collaborated by CeRV Research Center and the Agricultural Research in New Zealand. The project will fully harness the merits of hyper-spectrum from well-developed spectroscopic cameras for image acquisition. The focus of this project is on real-time food freshness monitoring and image based analysis for the foods like meat, milk powder or fruits. The success of this project will be a nudge to lessen human labor of those workers beside assembly lines and beef up cementing closer ties of the partners.

Deep Learning in Computer Vision

Dr Yuanyuan Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher from Shandong Academy of Sciences China addressed his research in deep learning and computer vision at AUT on 24 March 2016. Dr Zhang has delved into this project and will collaborate with CeRV team for one year, he has been engaged in human gait recognition and will strive for the applications of human behavior and activity recognition using deep learning and Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs).

Inaugural Professional Address

Computer vision originated in the 1960s, with the goal that a computer should be able to describe what it sees when connected to a camera. Computer vision is the research area of Professor Klette. This inaugural lecture presents some selected people and their academic contributions, along a path defined by academic genealogy. Research interactions along that path illustrate by examples several important and often unexpected moments in the complex development of science. Astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers, logicians, and finally computer scientists dominated some sections of that path. Who is going to dominate the next section?

Soaring Autonomous Vehicles

Invited by Chinese Academy of Sciences China, Professor Klette (FRSNZ) will prelect his speeches related to stereo vision and motion analysis for road safety in Beijing, the audience will be from the Institute of Information Engineering (IIE), Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Institute of Software (IS), Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science (AMSS), Institute of Automation (IA) of Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. Professor Klette has engaged in the relevant research over 10 years and will meet/share the experience with his friends and students from Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC) and Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) China. The CeRV research center is ushering the new era of full collaborations with China after this visit.

A CeRV Visitor from UCAS & NSFC China in 2016

Dr Laiyun Qing, an Associate Professor of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) from the National Natural Science Foundation China (NSFC) visited AUT CeRV research center as a collaborator and presented her work entitled Activity Auto-Completion (AAC): Predicting Human Activities from Partial Videos which was published in ICCV 2015. Dr Qing clinched her PhD degree from the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences, her AUT visit debuts the collaboration between CeRV and UCAS & NSFC.