Axel Lopez Gandia Ph.D. Defense

PhD Defense of Axel López Gandía- Monday, December 16th at 09:30 am – Room Turing-Petri

Title: Optical flow-based navigation algorithms for virtual characters

Abstract:

Simulation of real humans in virtual environment is an open problem with many applications, from the entertaining industry to safety in architectural planning. Humans poses a complex visual system capable of navigation in highly dynamic environments.
This thesis attempts to reproduce human behavior by imitating the human visual system. We designed an agent model capable of perceiving visual information and define a control model from it. In particular, we focus on the usage of optical flow, in other words, the apparent motion of objects.Two control loops are proposed, the first one operates with synthetic optical flow. It is an approximation available in virtual simulations that allows our agents to perceive this map with high precision. The second control loop computes optical flow from a sequence of color images using a numerical solver. This reproduces better the human perception system but the resulting flow loses accuracy. A novel characteristic of the latest control loop is the possibility of reacting to different lighting conditions.Finally, we evaluate our model by testing our agents in many scenarios with static and dynamic environments.

Jury composition:

– Ronan Boulic, Maître d’enseignement et de recherche, EPFL, Lausanne, Rapporteur
– Nuria Pelechano, Associate Professor, Univ. Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelone, Rapportrice
– Marilena Vendittelli, Associate Professor, Université La Sapienza, Rome, Examinatrice
– Patrick Bouthemy, Directeur de recherche Inria, Inria, Rennes, Examinateur
– Julien Pettré, Directeur de recherche Inria, Inria / IRISA, Renne, Directeur de Thèse
– François Chaumette, Directeur de recherche Inria, Inria / IRISA, Rennes, Co-Directeur de Thèse

 

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