We are a member of the German Collaborative Research Center 588 on “Humanoid Robots”. In this project we contribute key components for the visual perception of people and their activities to the Karlsruhe humanoid robot.

For a humanoid robot, the perception of the users, their locations, identities, gestures, and other communicative cues is an essential necessity for efficient and safe interaction. It allows the robot to understand what users want, and to generate an appropriate response. We are working on the visual perception capabilities of the humanoid robot Armar-III with respect to the user and his activities.

We are a member of the Franco-German research project Quaero, where we contribute to video-based and multimodal multimedia analysis, in particular the detection and recognition of people, events and genres in images and video.

In the BMBF-funded project PaGeVi (Parallel Gesichtserkennung in Videoströmen, parallel face recognition in videos) the goal is to improve face detection, tracking and recognition by means of parallelization and make it real-time capable for realistic scenarios.

Face tracking and recognition in real-work scenarios are very challenging due to many different factors. In the project, we supply the core computer vision components and algorithms. We are working on improving the state-of-the-art for meeting the challenges presented in realistic settings.

VIPSAFE is a R&D Project fruit of a collaboration between two research centers: Sabanci University and Karlsruhe Institut of Technology, and two companies: Videmo and Vistek. This 36 month long project is co-funded by Tübitak and BMBF with the main goal of improving patients’ safety by means of automated visual monitoring.

Population ageing is taking place in every country and region across the globe due to the rising life expectancy and the declining of birth rates. At the same time, the nations are facing an explosion of costs in the health-care sector as threating elderly people is 3 to 5 times more expensive than for those under 65. The dramatic increase of the elderly population along with the explosion of costs poses extreme challenges to society.