Team presentation

The overall goal of the PRIMA project-team is the elaboration of a scientific foundation for interactive environments. An interactive environment requires the capabilities of perception, action and communication. An environment is said to be perceptive if it is capable of maintaining a model of its occupants and their activities. Such may a model includes the identity of individuals, an estimation of their position, their recent trajectory, as well as recognition of the activities of individuals and groups. An environment becomes active when it is capable of action. Actions may include presentation of information. They may also include the capability to manage visual and acoustic communications, as well as the capability to transport documents and material. Controlling an environment that is perceptive and active requires a capability to interact. This capability may rely on speech recognition, gesture interpretation, interpretation of the manipulation of object and observation of the interaction of people.

The PRIMA project-team has as its mission to develop and integrate these three capabilities.

• The capacity to perceive and model the environment and its contents.
• The capacity to act by presenting information or service, or by transporting materials
• The capacity to communicate and interact with occupants.

Research themes

The PRIMA project-team concerns the development of techniques for machine perception of people and their activities. The research is organized along four axes:

• Multi-modal observation and tracking of people
• Integration and control of perceptual processes
• New forms of man-machine interaction
• Recognition and learning guided by the context of interaction