Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

QUAERO Project

Participants : Mohamed Ayari, Matthijs Douze, Dan Oneata, Danila Potapov, Alessandro Prest, Jerome Revaud, Cordelia Schmid, Franck Thollard, Heng Wang.

Quaero is a French-German search engine project supported by OSEO. It runs from 2008 to 2013 and includes many academic and industrial partners, such as Inria, CNRS, the universities of Karlsruhe and Aachen as well as LTU, Exalead and INA. LEAR/Inria is involved in the tasks of automatic image annotation, image clustering as well as large-scale image and video search. See http://www.quaero.org for more details.

ANR Project Qcompere

Participants : Guillaume Fortier, Cordelia Schmid, Jakob Verbeek.

This three-and-a-half year project started in November 2010. It is aimed at identifying people in video using both audio (using speech and speaker recognition) and visual data in challenging footage such as news broadcasts, or movies. The partners of this project are the CNRS laboratories LIMSI and LIG, the university of Caen, Inria's LEAR team, as well as two industrial partners Yacast and Vecsys Research.

ANR Project Physionomie

Participants : Frédéric Jurie [University of Caen] , Jakob Verbeek.

Face recognition is nowadays an important technology in many applications ranging from tagging people in photo albums, to surveillance, and law enforcement. In this 3-year project (2013–2016) the goal is to broaden the scope of usefulness of face recognition to situations where high quality images are available in a dataset of known individuals, which have to be identified in relatively poor quality surveillance footage. To this end we will develop methods that can compare faces despite an asymmetry in the imaging conditions, as well as methods that can help searching for people based on facial attributes (old/young, male/female, etc.). The tools will be evaluated by law-enforcement professionals. The participants of this project are: Morpho, SensorIT, Université de Caen, Université de Strasbourg, Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, Préfecture de Police, Service des Technologies et des Systèmes d’Information de la Sécurité Intérieure, and LEAR.