Project Proposal (PDF) - Oxford Brookes University

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FP7-ICT-2011-9 STREP proposal 18/01/12 v1 [Dynact] the level of individual partners and as a whole; represents a collection of widely complementary expertises, but at the same time is run by individuals who have multi-disciplinary scientific background in many or all the fields involved. 2.3.3 Suitability and commitment to the tasks assigned In virtue of its background illustrated above, the Oxford Brookes Vision Group (OBU) is obviosly extremely well placed to tackle the tasks assigned to it by the project proposed here: identification and classification of dynamical models for action recognition, in particular via metric learning approaches (WP2); learning and classification of novel dynamical discriminative models (WP3); gathering a corpus of range/stereo videos of actions and gesture in various scenarios (WP4); selection and extraction of features from both range cameras and traditional video (WP4); application and validation in a variety of different scenarios (WP5). SYSTeMS and IDSIA are two of the top European groups in Imprecise Probabilities and related theories. Their pioneering work on imprecise (robust) graphical models and the generalisation of the Expectation Maximisation algorithm to convex sets of probabilities is at the current edge of the research in the field. Clearly, it is difficult to think of other research groups in Europe more suitable than SYSTeMS and IDSIA to the crucial tasks assigned to them by the present project: imprecise EM and its application to hidden Markov models (WP1); imprecise Markov models and general imprecise graphical models (WP1); the classification of imprecise graphical models (WP2). There is in fact a partial overlap between the skills of these two partners, which are both engaged in theoretical research about imprecise probabilities and graphical models. The level of ambition of the project in this area, however (just think of the formulation of a general theory of imprecise graphical models), simply requires the combined effort of two different partners. The ongoing fruitful interaction between the two groups (which have a long tradition of joint works) is certainly going to facilitate a fast and satisfactory achievement of the required tasks. Supélec and DYNAMIXYZ, besides adding their own specific value to the consortium, form another couple of closely linked partners, with a long record of close and fruitful collaboration in the field of virtual animation and the use and commercialisation of active appearance models in the entertainment industry. As a results, they have won prizes for gesture recognition challenges and established a network of commercial contacts which will be invaluable for this project. They are therefore excellently placed to tackle: the capturing of novel testbeds via range cameras for the gaming and animations scenarios (WP4); the generation of realistic virtual clones of actors with a specific style (WP5); and the recognition of facial expression (WP5). 2.3.4 Complementarity between partecipants and overall balance A clear complementarity emerges between the five partners involved in this proposal. IDSIA and SYSTeMS are world leaders on imprecise dynamical models and imprecise probabilities at large. OBU is world leader in computer vision and machine learning, including the target fields of the present proposal: action and gesture recognition, identity recognition from gait. OBU can bring valuable existing infrastructure to the consortium, including range cameras, motion capture devices, computer clusters, and the equipment provided by its Intelligent Transport Systems doctoral programme. The Coordinator is a leading researcher in imprecise probabilities, while both OBU and Supélec/DYNAMIXYZ can provide their industrial expertise and relations, together with the infrastructure necessary for prototype implementation in the manifold scenarios identified by this project. OBU can further support the project via its wealth of industrial connections with world class companies in the field, while IDSIA and SYSTeMS are at the center of the academic community of imprecise probabilities. All partners have extensive networks of collaborations. As a result, we believe, the consortium is carefully designed and quite well balanced, with respect to the objectives of the project stated in Section 1.1, providing a good mix of expertises and backgrounds, both academic and industrial, in the proportions necessary to ensure the success of the project. Proposal Part B: page [48] of [67]
FP7-ICT-2011-9 STREP proposal 18/01/12 v1 [Dynact] 2.4 Resources to be committed Consortium as a whole. Travel to international conferences. We request funding in order to allow the partners to attend an adequate number of top international conferences (such as ICCV, ECCV, NIPS, CVPR, ISIPTA, UAI, AAAI) each year, maximizing in this way the academic dissemination of the results. Acceptance rates at these conferences are extremely low (in particular, for vision conferences 15% for poster presentation, around 3-5% for oral presentation) and the potential impact is enormous, as papers presented as orals give the authors the chance to talk about their work in front of an audience of 1200 people, among which all the best researchers in the field and many attendees from research divisions of companies such as Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Honeywell, etc, making such a publication of even greater impact than a journal article. Coordination activities. A sum is requested to fund the foreseen biennial project meetings, as long as a number of visits between the partners in order to coordinate their actions in a more flexible way. The number of feedbacks and loops between the different parts of the project require a constant coordination, part of which will of necessity have to involve physical travel between the partners. Junior staff will be incouraged to pay short visits to other partners in order to gain perspective on the overall project's objectives and targets. Dissemination activities. We request some money to support out impact and dissemination plan (see section 3.2 for a more detailed description). We foresee in particular: customized seminars/presentations to be given at companies active in video games/surveillance/biometrics/robotics with the goal of promoting KTP-like industrial partnerships even beyond the lifespan of the project; visits to other research groups in Europe to kickstart follow-up projects at both national and European level; meetings with public authorities and government agencies in the European Union, focussing on the security applications of our research; the organization of special sessions at major conferences to maximize the impact of our breakthroughs; the organisation of press conferences to disseminate results to the wider public. Partner 1 – OBU Coordinator. The Coordinator will assign 25% of his time to the project, divided into a 5/9=56% attributed to research activities and 4/9=44% to coordination and management (WP6). More specifically, the Coordinator will directly contribute with his expertise to WPs 2 and 3, and supervise the work of the postdoc and postgraduate research assistants. Consortium manager. A consortium manager will be employed part-time (25% of full time) to assist the Coordinator in managing and coordination consortium acitivities and relationships with the EC. Postdoctoral researcher. Two postdoctoral researchers are requested full time for the entire lifespan of the project (36 months) to conduct the theoretical research assigned to OBU, i.e., work packages 2 (on the classification of dynamical generative models) and WP3 (on dynamical discriminative modelling). Post graduate research assistant. A postgraduate researcher is requested full time for the entire lifespan of the project (36 months) to conduct the more application-related part of the research assigned to OBU, i.e., work packages 4 (data gathering and feature extraction) and 5 (validation in multiple scenarios). In particular, OBU will work on the gait identification, gaming, robotics and video retrieval scenarios. Equipment. Infrastructure and equipment in the form of range cameras, Kinect consoles, a motion capture room, an autonomous qoud bike, stereo cameras and poweful computer clusters will be provided by OBU in addition to the EC contribution, greatly contributing to the final success of the project. Software licences for packages such as Matlab and others will be needed. Auditing. We also request an allowance under “subcontracting” for an external audit on the project. Proposal Part B: page [49] of [67]
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Project Proposal (PDF) - Oxford Brookes University

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