Fall Short e-course on Drone (UAV) Vision and Deep Learning Call for Participation

Dear Drone engineers, scientists and enthusiasts,

you are welcomed to register in this Fall Short e-course on Drone
(UAV) Vision and Deep Learning with focus on drone vision/perception,
imaging, surveillance, infrastructure inspection, media production and
cinematography.

It will take place on 18-19th November 2020 as an e-course (due to
COVID-19 circumstances), hosted by the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki (AUTH), Thessaloniki, Greece, providing a series of live
lectures delivered through a tele-education platform. They will be
complemented with on line video recorded lectures and lecture pdfs, to
facilitate international participants having time difference issues
and to enable you to study at own pace.

You can also self-assess your CVML knowledge before/after the course
by filling appropriate questionnaires (one per lecture). You will be
provided programming exercises to improve your CVML programming
skills.
 

The short e-course consists of 16 1-hour lectures organized in two
parts (one per day):

Part A lectures (8 hours) provide an in-depth presentation to drone
systems, mission planning/control and imaging. First, an introduction
to multiple drone systems is presented. Then, drone mission planning
and control is overviewed, to be complemented by a lecture on drone
mission simulations. After reviewing image acquisition, camera
geometry (mapping the 3D world on a 2D image plane) and camera
calibration, stereo and multi-view imaging systems are presented for
recovering 3D world geometry from 2D images. This is complemented by
Structure from Motion (SfM) towards Simultaneous Localization and
Mapping (SLAM) for vehicle and/or target localization and visual
object tracking and 3D localization. Finally, drone communications are
overviewed, focusing on drone2ground multiple drone LTE
communications, notably on multiple source video compression and
streaming.

Part B lectures (8 hours) provide first an in-depth presentation of
drone computational cinematography that are useful in many
applications, besides media production. Then, an introduction to
neural networks, provides rigorous formulation of the optimization
problems for their training, starting with Perceptron. It continues
with Multilayer perceptron training through Backpropagation,
presenting many related problems, such as over-/under-fitting and
generalization. Deep neural networks, notably Convolutional NNs are
the core of this domain nowadays and they are overviewed in great
detail. Their application on deep learning for object detection is
well presented, as it is a very important issue as well, complemented
with a presentation of deep semantic image segmentation. As embedded
computing is such an important issue, CVML software development tools
and their use in drone imaging is overviewed. This part is concluded
with an extremely important drone imaging application, notably, UAV
infrastructure inspection.

You can use the following link for course registration:

http://icarus.csd.auth.gr/cvml-for-autonomous-systems/

 

Lecture topics, sample lecture ppts and videos, self-assessment
questionnaires and programming exercises can be found therein.

For questions, please contact: Ioanna Koroni 
 

The short course is organized by Prof. I. Pitas, 
IEEE and EURASIP fellow, 
Chair of the IEEE SPS Autonomous Systems Initiative, 
Director of the 
Artificial Intelligence and Information analysis Lab (AIIA Lab), 
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, 
Coordinator of the European Horizon2020

R&D project Multidrone. He is ranked 249-top Computer Science and
Electronics scientist internationally by Guide2research (2018). He is
head of the EC funded AI doctoral school of Horizon2020 EU funded R&D
project AI4Media (1 of the 4 in Europe). He has 31600+ citations to
his work and h-index 85+.

 

AUTH is ranked 153/182 internationally in Computer
Science/Engineering, respectively, in USNews ranking.