Prof. Angel Sappa

ESPOL Polytechnic University (Ecuador) and Computer Vision Center (Spain)

Speaker 2

Computer Vision Beyond the Visible Spectrum

The computer vision community has mostly focused on the development of vision algorithms for object detection, tracking, and classification with visible range sensors in day and office-like environments. In the last decade, infrared (IR), depth, thermal and other non-visible imaging sensors were used only in special area like medicine, remote sensing and defense. The relatively lower interest level in those sensory areas in comparison to visible spectrum imaging was due in part to their high cost, low resolutions, poor image quality, lack of widely available data sets, and/or lack of consideration of the potential advantages of the non-visible part of the spectrum. These objections are becoming overcome as sensory technology is advancing rapidly and the sensor cost is dropping dramatically. Image sensing devices with high dynamic range and IR sensitivity have started to appear in a growing number of applications ranging from defense and automotive domains to home and office security. In this talk firstly a short introduction to the imaging domain beyond the visible spectrum will be given. Then, different contributions and open research problems in this domain will be covered, including near infrared and far infrared domains.

Prof. Angel D. Sappa received his ElectroMechanical Engineering degree (1995) from National University of La Pampa, Argentina, and his Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering (1999) from Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. In 2003, after research positions in France (LAAS-CNRS), the UK (UK Advanced Robotics) and Greece (ITI-CERTH), he joined the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain, where he currently holds a Senior Scientist position. Since 2016 he is a full professor at the ESPOL Polytechnic University, Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he leads the computer vision team at CIDIS research center; he is the director of the Electrical Engineering PhD program. He has more than 25 years of experience in computer vision and artificial intelligence domains. His research interests include cross-spectral image processing and representation; 3D data acquisition, processing, and modeling; and computer vision applications. He published about 200 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and served as program committee member in several international conferences. He has been co-chair in the CVPR workshop IEEE-PBVS-2020 and IEEE-PBVS-2019; Tutorial, Workshops and Special Session Chair of IEEE 3DTV-CON 2017; conference chair of the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Imaging 2012 and 2010; program chair of the International Conference on Visualization, Imaging, and Image Processing 2008 / 2007 / 2006 and 2005. He has been one of the editors of the book “Multimodal Interaction in Image and Video Applications”, A. D. Sappa and J. Vitrià (top 25% most downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection in 2013). He is the editor in Chief of Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis; Associate editor of Remote Sensing (MDPI); Guest editor of: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Elsevier), Sensors (MDPI), and Journal of Computational Science (Elsevier). He has been involved in several national, regional and international research projects. Currently he is the coordinator of an Ibero-American network (CYTED program) on the usage of ICT for smart cities. He has been involved in several technological transfer projects with national and international companies and has been the cofounder of VINTRA Inc. (San Francisco, USA) and Crowdmobile S.L. (Barcelona, Spain). He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).