What Do Animals See? Intentionality, Objects and Kantian Nonconceptualism

This article addresses three questions concerning Kant’s views on non-rational animals: do they intuit spatio-temporal particulars, do they perceive objects, and do they have intentional states? My aim is to explore the relationship between these questions and to clarify certain pervasive ambiguities in how they have been understood. I first disambiguate various nonequivalent notions of objecthood and intentionality: I then look closely at several models of objectivity present in Kant’s work, and at recent discussions of representational and relational theories of intentionality. I argue ultimately that, given the relevant disambiguations, the answers to all three questions will likely be positive. These results both support what has become known as the nonconceptualist reading of Kant, and make clearer the price the conceptualist must pay to sustain her positio

A study of deep learning and its applications to face recognition techniques

El siguiente trabajo es el resultado de la tesis de maestría de Fernando Suzacq. La tesis se centró alrededor de la investigación sobre el reconocimiento facial en 3D, sin la reconstrucción de la profundidad ni la utilización de modelos 3D genéricos. Esta investigación resultó en la escritura de un paper y su posterior publicación en IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Mediante el uso de iluminación activa, se mejora el reconocimiento facial en 2D y se lo hace más robusto a condiciones de baja iluminación o ataques de falsificación de identidad. La idea central del trabajo es la proyección de un patrón de luz de alta frecuencia sobre la cara de prueba. De la captura de esta imagen, nos es posible recuperar información real 3D, que se desprende de las deformaciones de este patrón, junto con una imagen 2D de la cara de prueba. Este proceso evita tener que lidiar con la difícil tarea de reconstrucción 3D. En el trabajo se presenta la teoría que fundamenta este proceso, se explica su construcción y se proveen los resultados de distintos experimentos realizados que sostienen su validez y utilidad. Para el desarrollo de esta investigación, fue necesario el estudio de la teoría existente y una revisión del estado del arte en este problema particular. Parte del resultado de este trabajo se presenta también en este documento, como marco teórico sobre la publicación

Inner Space Preserving Generative Pose Machine

Image-based generative methods, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) have already been able to generate realistic images with much context control, specially when they are conditioned. However, most successful frameworks share a common procedure which performs an image-to-image translation with pose of figures in the image untouched. When the objective is reposing a figure in an image while preserving the rest of the image, the state-of-the-art mainly assumes a single rigid body with simple background and limited pose shift, which can hardly be extended to the images under normal settings. In this paper, we introduce an image "inner space" preserving model that assigns an interpretable low-dimensional pose descriptor (LDPD) to an articulated figure in the image. Figure reposing is then generated by passing the LDPD and the original image through multi-stage augmented hourglass networks in a conditional GAN structure, called inner space preserving generative pose machine (ISP-GPM). We evaluated ISP-GPM on reposing human figures, which are highly articulated with versatile variations. Test of a state-of-the-art pose estimator on our reposed dataset gave an accuracy over 80% on PCK0.5 metric. The results also elucidated that our ISP-GPM is able to preserve the background with high accuracy while reasonably recovering the area blocked by the figure to be reposed.Comment: http://www.northeastern.edu/ostadabbas/2018/07/23/inner-space-preserving-generative-pose-machine