Vision and Cognitive Systems

General information

CourseVision and Cognitive Systems
Credits 9
Professor Rita CUCCHIARA

Brief content description

Computer Vision studies how to perceive and understand the world through visual data by computers. In technical sense, it designs and develops systems providing image processing, 2D to 3D reconstruction by images, video recognition and understanding. In a broader sense it is the visual part of Artificial Intelligence and the most important building block of cognitive systems. Cognitive computing integrates artificial intelligence and signal processing: it uses sense data (image, audio, sound, depth and other) to extract knowledge and inferences applied to real working contexts, as Human Machine Interaction, robotics, and big data analysis. This course gives fundamentals of computer vision and cognitive systems: image formation, 3D geometry, image processing and analysis, motion estimation, object detection, tracking, and classification. Then it will provide an integration of vision paradigms to broader cognitive computing with reference to neuroscience, machine learning and AI. It will be mainly a laboratory course with some theoretical lectures and many lab, programming in Python, using libraries (OpenCv and PyTorch for Deep Learning) and using sensors (cameras, eye-trackers, ...). It is an engineering course: it will give capabilities to design vision and cognitive systems use the most known algorithms and create new ones. Projects will be in different applications, mainly in video-surveillance, human behavior understanding in video (face, body, gesture recognition), automotive and autonomous driving, HMI and robot vision. The theory of cognitive systems will allow the understanding of future AI trends, how to design and implement software systems capable to learn, interact and work with humans, by sensing. Practical examples of projects carried out in big companies as Google, Panasonic, IBM, Facebook and Amazon will be presented and visits to growing companies working in computer vision and cognitive platforms will be scheduled.

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