PhD Defense – Viachaslau Kachurka

Viachaslau Kachurka, PhD student in team SYNAPSE will defend his thesis on December 20th at 14:30 in Amphi F2 of Campus de Sénart of the UPEC-36 rue Georges Charpak, 77567 Lieusaint.

Title

Contribution to Perception and Artificial Bio-inspired Visual Attention for Acquisition and Conceptualization of Knowledge in Autonomous Robotics.

Abstract

Dealing with the field of "Bio-inspired Perception", the present thesis focuses more particularly on Artificial Visual Attention and Visual Saliency. A concept of Artificial Visual Attention, inspired from the human mechanisms, providing a model of such artificial bio-inspired attention, was developed, implemented and tested in the context of autonomous robotics. Although there are several models of visual saliency, in terms of contrast and cognition, there is no hybrid model integrating both mechanisms of attention: the visual aspect and the cognitive aspect. To carry out such a model, we have explored existing approaches in the field of visual attention, as well as several approaches and paradigms in related fields (such as object recognition, artificial learning, classification, etc.). A functional architecture of a hybrid visual attention system, combining principles and mechanisms derived from human visual attention with computational and algorithmic methods, was implemented, explained and detailed. Another major contribution of this doctoral work is the theoretical modeling, development and practical application of the aforementioned Bio-inspired Visual Attention model, providing a basis for the autonomy of assistance-robotic systems. The carried out studies and experimental validation of the proposed models confirmed the relevance of the proposed approach in increasing the autonomy of robotic systems within a real environment.