Postdoc Offer - Computer Vision for Scene Understanding and Human Motion Pattern Recognition

Introduction:

The Centre for Robotics of MINES ParisTech is involved in several research projects on human motion pattern recognition applied to the Factory of the Future, the Creative and Cultural Industries and the Autonomous Vehicles. The main objective of these projects is the development of novel methodologies and technological paradigms that improve the perception of the machine and allows for natural body interactions in human-machine partnerships.

Topic:

MINES ParisTech is opening a Postdoctoral position on Computer Vision for Scene Understanding and Human Motion Pattern Recognition in the context of H2020 collaborative projects. Whether in manufacturing or the creative industries, professional gestures are executed by workers or craftsmen while they manipulate tools and materials in order to assemble or create an object. The value of motor skills in such activities is very important. For example, simple tasks, such as the marking and cutting of leather pieces or sewing main panels of a product are common in different basic leather crafting procedures and they can be either completely manually executed or assisted by a collaborative robot. Preserving, understanding and transmitting the motor skills of these professions, by using motion capturing and gesture recognition technologies, constitutes a very important challenge for researchers, instructors, ergonomists and human resources departments. Moreover, there is an increasing need for machine learning in the professional context where humans perform gestures while interacting with objects, tools and devices on their workbench. The team of the Centre for Robotics has developed machine learning algorithms that can extract meaningful features from optical, depth and/or RGB-D sensing (e.g. Random Decision Forests, Geodesic distances etc.) that are able to segment the scene into objects, workbench, body poses etc.. Moreover, the team is currently working on the gesture/action recognition based on time-series from 3D coordinates, rotations and other motion descriptors. Early recognition and prediction techniques have also been developed.

The Postdoctoral researcher will actively contribute to specific research and innovation tasks of H2020 projects (with a focus on Creative and Cultural Industries) as they have been described in the Description of Work of the project. The team of the Centre for Robotics is expecting from the candidate to extend their existing knowledge or to bring new scientific and technical skills in deep/machine learning for scene understanding and/or in 3D pose detection and/or in object and gesture recognition. Active assistance in the teaching duties of the Post-Master’s Degree AIMove is also expected. Moreover, the Postdoctoral researcher will jointly supervise PhD students, research engineers and interns.

This position gives the possibility to the candidate to work with other European researchers both in the project and in the wider academic community, as well as opportunities to work directly with industrial partners. Moreover, the candidate will acquire transferable skills that will enhance future employability through leading and contributing to highly interactive and collaborative work. Finally, the candidate will be autonomous and concentrated on his/her work and will contribute to the project and team management tasks, such as preparation of the project meetings (distance calls or physical meetings in different European countries – 3 per year), reports and deliverables.