• ICRA 2014 Workshop on Active Visual Learning and Hierarchical Visual Representations for General-Purpose Robot Vision

Aim

Computer vision is crucial for achieving adaptive, flexible, and robust robotics. In recent years we have witnessed a significant progress in the areas such as 3D object and scene acquisition and modeling, real-time processing and visual learning. In particular, statistical approaches stemming from machine learning have led to the development of many impressive vision systems, whose performance can, in some cases, even surpass human capabilities. However, despite this significant progress, the success stories are manly limited to specific tasks and scenes. General-purpose vision, as needed by robots to operate in ever changing natural environments and interact with people, remains elusive. What is needed is a development of representations and learning mechanisms that provide capabilities to acquire new visual models and procedures in an incremental (developmental), open-ended way, grounded in the experiences of the robot acting in its working environment. Active robot exploration can provide new data, which is highly relevant for expanding the robot’s capabilities. However, the solutions how to achieve sharable representations and scalable mechanisms to enable visual learning from a small amount of data, remain vital for the overall success. The goal of this workshop is to bring together robotics and computer vision researchers interested in developing advanced robot vision systems, capable of active and open-ended learning of visual representations for recognition, tracking, manipulation, navigation, and surveillance on general-purpose robots.

Workshop Program

09:00 - 09:05	Welcome
09:05 - 09:35	Norbert Krüger, University of Southern Denmark, Odense Hierarchical structure of the human visual system
09:35 - 10:05	Silvio Sabatini, University of Genoa Deep representation hierarchies for 3D active vision
10:05 - 10:35	Aleš Leonardis, University of Birmingham Compositional hierarchies for scalable robot vision
10:35 - 10:55	Coffee break
10:55 - 11:25	Michael Zillich, Technical University Vienna Perceptual grouping in RGB-D for semantically rich visual representations
11:25 - 11:55	Tomohiro Shibata, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu A hybrid direct feature matching based on-line loop-closure detection algorithm for topological mapping
11:55 - 12:25	Mario Fritz, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken Scalable learning and perception
12:25 - 14:00	Lunch break
14:00 - 14:30	Francesca Odone, University of Genoa Teaching iCub to see its world
14:30 - 15:00	Aaron Bobick, Georgia Tech, Atlanta Structured representations of human robot collaborative action
15:00 - 15:30	Tamim Asfour, Karslruhe Institute of Technology Active visual perception for humanoid robots
15:30 - 15:50	Coffee break
15:50 - 16:20	Kostas Daniilidis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Active vision revisited
16:20 - 16:50	Manuel Lopes, INRIA, Bordeaux Learning Tasks and Representations from Human-Machine Interactions
16:50 - 17:10	Aleš Ude, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana Active visual learning on a humanoid robot
17:10 - 17:30	Discussion

The program can also be downloaded as pdf.

Main Topics

• Scalable visual representations
• Hierarchical visual representations in robotics
• Hierarchical architectures in human vision
• Visual learning by active manipulation
• Visual learning on mobile robots
• Open-ended statistical learning of visual representations
• Developmental approaches to visual learning on robots
• Learning of visual representations for robot manipulation
• Active vision systems and humanoid heads
• Visual attention / curiosity

Organizers

• Aleš Ude, Jožef Stefan Institute, Dept. of Automatics, Biocybernetics, and Robotics, Humanoid and Cognitive Robotics Lab, Slovenia
• Aleš Leonardis, University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, Intelligent Robotics Lab, UK
• Kostas Daniilidis, University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Laboratory, Philadelphia, USA
• Tamim Asfour, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Anthropomatics, Germany

Time and Place

The workshop will take place on May 31st, 2014, as part of the workshop programme of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), which will be held in Hong Kong, China.

Support

This workshop is supported by

• European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems, Interaction and Robotics,

and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society technical committees

• IEEE-RAS Technical committee on Computer & Robot Vision,
  
• IEEE-RAS Technical committee on Mobile Manipulation, and
• IEEE-RAS Technical committee on Humanoid Robots.