Tele-media-art: web-based inclusive teaching of body expression

Conferência Internacional, realizada em Olhão, Algarve, de 26-28 de abril de 2018.The Tele-Media-Art project aims to promote the improvement of the online distance learning and artistic teaching process applied in the teaching of two test scenarios, doctorate in digital art-media and the lifelong learning course ”the experience of diversity” by exploiting multimodal telepresence facilities encompassing the diversified visual, auditory and sensory channels, as well as rich forms of gestural / body interaction. To this end, a telepresence system was developed to be installed at Palácio Ceia, in Lisbon, Portugal, headquarters of the Portuguese Open University, from which methodologies of artistic teaching in mixed regime - face-to-face and online distance - that are inclusive to blind and partially sighted students. This system has already been tested against a group of subjects, including blind people. Although positive results were achieved, more development and further tests will be carried in the futureThis project was financed by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation under Grant number 142793.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Vision-Guided Robot Hearing

International audienceNatural human-robot interaction (HRI) in complex and unpredictable environments is important with many potential applicatons. While vision-based HRI has been thoroughly investigated, robot hearing and audio-based HRI are emerging research topics in robotics. In typical real-world scenarios, humans are at some distance from the robot and hence the sensory (microphone) data are strongly impaired by background noise, reverberations and competing auditory sources. In this context, the detection and localization of speakers plays a key role that enables several tasks, such as improving the signal-to-noise ratio for speech recognition, speaker recognition, speaker tracking, etc. In this paper we address the problem of how to detect and localize people that are both seen and heard. We introduce a hybrid deterministic/probabilistic model. The deterministic component allows us to map 3D visual data onto an 1D auditory space. The probabilistic component of the model enables the visual features to guide the grouping of the auditory features in order to form audiovisual (AV) objects. The proposed model and the associated algorithms are implemented in real-time (17 FPS) using a stereoscopic camera pair and two microphones embedded into the head of the humanoid robot NAO. We perform experiments with (i)~synthetic data, (ii)~publicly available data gathered with an audiovisual robotic head, and (iii)~data acquired using the NAO robot. The results validate the approach and are an encouragement to investigate how vision and hearing could be further combined for robust HRI

In Car Audio

This chapter presents implementations of advanced in Car Audio Applications. The system is composed by three main different applications regarding the In Car listening and communication experience. Starting from a high level description of the algorithms, several implementations on different levels of hardware abstraction are presented, along with empirical results on both the design process undergone and the performance results achieved