Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria International Labs

Inria@EastCoast

Associate Team involved in the International Lab:

GAYA

• Title: Semantic and Geometric Models for Video Interpretation

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Carnegie Mellon University (United States) - Robotics Institute - Deva Ramanan

• Start year: 2016

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/gaya/

• We propose to form an associate team GAYA, with the primary goal of interpreting videos in terms of recognizing actions, understanding the human-human and human-object interactions. Despite several years of research, it is yet unclear what is an efficient and robust video representation to attack this challenge. In order to address this, GAYA will focus on building semantic models, wherein we learn the video feature representation with limited supervision, and also geometric models, where we study the geometric properties of object shapes to better recognize them. The team consists of researchers from two Inria project-teams (LEAR and WILLOW) and a US university (Carnegie Mellon University [CMU]). It will allow the three teams to effectively combine their respective strengths in areas such as inference and machine learning approaches for vision tasks, feature representation, large-scale learning, geometric reasoning. The main expected outcomes of this collaboration are: effective learnt representations of video content, new machine learning algorithms for handling minimally annotated data, large-scale public datasets for benchmarking, theoretical analysis of objects shapes and contours.

Inria International Partners

Informal International Partners

• MPI Tübingen: Cordelia Schmid collaborates with Michael Black, a research director at MPI, starting in 2013. End of 2015 she was award a Humbolt research award funding a long-term research project with colleagues at MPI. She spent one month at MPI in April 2018. In 2018, the project resulted in the development of an approach for object interaction.

• University of Washington: Julien Mairal collaborates with Zaid Harchaoui, former member of the team, on the topic of large-scale optimization.

Participation in Other International Programs

• Indo-French project EVEREST with IIIT Hyderabad, India, funded by CEFIPRA (Centre Franco-Indien pour la Promotion de la Recherche Avancee). The aim of this project between Cordelia Schmid, Karteek Alahari and C. V. Jawahar (IIIT Hyderabad) is to enable the use of rich, complex models that are required to address the challenges of high-level computer vision. The work plan for the project will follow three directions. First, we will develop a learning framework that can handle weak annotations. Second, we will build formulations to solve the non-convex optimization problem resulting from the learning framework. Third, we will develop efficient and accurate energy minimization algorithms, in order to make the optimization computationally feasible.