Overview of Research Activities in the interACT Research Center: Computer Vision & Face Recognition

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                Joint Seminar
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The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

InterACT at HKUST
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering

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Speaker: Dr. Hazim K. EKENEL
	 International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies
	 The University of Karlsruhe

Title:	"Overview of Research Activities in the interACT Research Center:
	 Computer Vision & Face Recognition"

Date:	Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Time :	3:00pm-4:00pm

Venue :	Lecture Theater E
	Chia-Wei Woo Academic Concourse, HKUST


Abstract:

In this talk we present an overview of research activities that have been
conducted in the interACT research center at the University of Karlsruhe
(TH) with the emphasis on developed computer vision systems and robust
face recognition.  In the talk, first, University of Karlsruhe (TH) and
interACT research center will be introduced briefly.  Afterwards,
developed computer vision systems will be presented. The rest of the talk
will be focused on robust face recognition.

Face recognition has attracted significant amount of research efforts
during the last two decades.  A plethora of appearance-based face
recognition algorithms have dominated the literature. Nevertheless, these
approaches are not able to handle the variations that can occur on facial
appearance due to changing illumination, occlusion, aging, etc. Only a
subset of these approaches, which have been specifically developed to
combat against one of these variations, can handle the facial appearance
variations that they are developed for.  However, for reliable real-world
operation, a face recognition algorithm has to handle all the variations
that it can confront with. In the robust face recognition part of the
talk, this problem will be addressed and a generic face recognition
algorithm that performs robustly against the variations in facial
appearance will be described. In addition, several face recognition
systems that have been developed based on this algorithm will be
presented.


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Biography:

Hazim K. Ekenel is a member of the International Center for Advanced
Communication Technologies (interACT) at the University of Karlsruhe (TH).
He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Electronic
engineering from Bogazici University in 2001 and 2003, respectively, and
Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in
2009.  His current research focuses on face recognition and content-based
image and video retrieval.  He has been developing face recognition
systems for smart environments, humanoid robots and video analysis.  He
had been the task leader for face recognition in the European Computers in
the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) project and he organized face
recognition evaluations within the CLEAR 2006, 2007 international
evaluation campaigns.  He has been responsible for face recognition in the
German Humanoid Robots project. He is a committee member of the Core
Technology Cluster (CTC) in the French-German Quaero project.  He has
received the EBF European Biometric Research Award in 2008 for his
contributions to the field of face recognition.  He also has received the
Best Demo Award at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and
Gesture Recognition 2008. In addition to his research activities on face
recognition, he has been also leading the video retrieval systems
development efforts for the NIST TRECVID 2007, 2008 evaluations.