Author Archives: David Vazquez

  • 0

GTC 2016 Autonomous Driving Talk

5th of April, Antonio M. López principal investigator at ADAS group, will give a talk about “Training My Car to See: Using Virtual Worlds” at theGPU Technology Conference
Learn how realistic virtual worlds can be used to train vision-based classifiers that operate in the real world, i.e., avoiding the cumbersome task of collecting ground truth by manual annotation. Many vision-based applications rely on classifiers trained with annotated data. We avoid manual annotation by using realistic computer graphics (e.g. video games). However, the accuracy of the classifiers drops because virtual (training) and real (operation) worlds are different. We overcome the problem using domain adaptation (DA) techniques. In the context of vision-based driver assistance and autonomous driving, we present our DA experiences using classifiers based on both handcrafted features and CNNs. We show how GPUs are used in all the stages of our training and operation paradigm.


  • 0

GTC 2016 best poster award

The poster “GPU-based Pedestrian Detection for Autonomous Driving” on the detector pedestrian based on vision has been awarded as the best poster GTC (GPU Technology Conference) 2016. The student Victor Campmany, with the help of the rest of the ADAS group at the Computer Vision center has been the winner of this contest.

The work done by Computer Vision Center research group has been developed in collaboration with members of CAOS Juan C. Moure and Toni Espinosa. This pedestrian detector based on computer vision intended to be used in autonomous driving and running in real time on a GPU NVIDIA type.

GPU Technology Conference NVIDIA (GTC), was held from 4 to 7 April in San Jose, California. At the epicenter of visual computing, GTC is the forum biggest and most important in the world GPU, and brings together the entire ecosystem of NVIDIA in this prestigious event.


  • 0

David Vazquez and Gabriel Villalonga awarded by ITSS Society

The ITSS Society (Intelligent Transportation Systems Society) has awarded the doctoral thesis of Dr. David Vázquez “Domain Adaptation of Virtual Worlds for Pedestrian Detection”  with the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis on Intelligent Transport Systems in Spain.

The award is accompanied by a fee of 600 Euros and a diploma. The award ceremony was held on November 26 at 18:00 in the Auditorium of the Polytechnic School at the University of Alcalá, located on the campus of the University. Dr. Vazquez also made a brief presentation of his thesis, during the event.

In addition, Gabriel Villalonga, a doctoral student, was also honored for his final master thesis: Online City Maps with Pedestrian Behaviours Statistics. Like Dr. Vázquez, he made a brief presentation of his work and received the award in the act of 26th


  • 0

Best master dissertation award

Gabriel Villalonga, a PhD student in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) has been awarded by theSpanish Chapter of the ITSS Society (Intelligent Transportation Systems Society) for his Master in Computer Vision master thesis: “Online City Maps with Pedestrian Behaviours Statistics”.

He has been awarded with the 3rd prize for the Best final degree project on Intelligent Transport Systems in Spain.

The award ceremony will be held within the event held by the ITSS on Thursday November 26 at 18:00 in the Auditorium of thePolytechnic School of the University of Alcalá.

The work was supervised by Dr. Antonio Lopez, head of the research group ADAS, Dr. David Vazquez and Germán Ros, both researchers of this research group.


  • 0

2nd prize for the best dissemination project

The Catalan association for artificial intelligence (ACAI) has awarded Dr. Antonio Lopez and the members of theAdvanced Driver Assistance Systems Group (ADAS) with the 2nd prize for the best dissemination of a research project in artificial intelligence. The award consists of a prize of 200€.

The diffusion of science is a necessary task. For this reason, the Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence (ACIA) promotes the dissemination of Artificial Intelligence through mass media (newspapers, TV, Internet).

The main aim of ADAS group is to combine sensors and algorithms to understand the vehicle environment so that the driver can receive assistance or be warned of potential hazards. Vision is the most important sense employed for driving, therefore cameras are the most used sensor in these systems. Currently, the group is also working on autonomous driving.


  • 0

Best PhD thesis award

The ITSS Society (Intelligent Transportation Systems Society) has awarded the doctoral thesis of Dr. David Vazquez “Domain Adaptation of Virtual Worlds for Pedestrian Detection”  with the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis on Intelligent Transport Systems in Spain.

The award is accompanied by a fee of 600 Euros and a diploma. The award ceremony will be held under the ceremony held on November 26 at 18:00 in the Auditorium of the Polytechnic School  at the University of Alcalá, located on the campus of the University. Dr. Vazquez will have to make a brief presentation of his thesis, during the event.


  • 0

David Vázquez PhD thesis chosen as the best thesis by AERFAI

Dr. David Vázquez, graduated and PhD by the engineering school at UAB, received the best thesis award by the Spanish Association for Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (AERFAI).

The thesis, entitled “Domain Adaptation of Virtual and Real Worlds for Pedestrian Detection”, has already received other awards previously:CERCA research centers awarded this work as well as the Autonomous University of Barcelona, which awarded him the “Outstanding PhD Award” from the Department of Computer Science.

The work was led by Dr. Antonio López Pena, UAB professor and head of the research group of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) at the Computer Vision Center who also directed his final degree work in the computer vision field applied to the assistance of driving. ADAS is currently working on developing an autonomous car based on computer vision. They are currently open to receiving students to assist in their work.


  • 0

European Researchers’ Night 2015

Last Friday Europe celebrated the Researcher’s Night. It is a Europe-wide public event dedicated to popular science and fun learning.

It takes place each year on the last Friday in September and more than 30 countries and over 300 cities are involved in this big event. The main objective is to showcase what researchers really do for society, in interactive and engaging ways, and promote research careers to young people and their parents.

From 17:00h to 21:00h public and private research institutions went to the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona (CCCB) with multiple interesting and fun activities  that allowed the visitors to have a bigger understanding of researcher’s job.

This year was the 1st one that the CVC decided to participate.

We showed a pedestrians detector demonstration and the autonomous car, both projects developed by the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems’ group.

We had the opportunity to share our work with the citizens of Barcelona that decided to come to us, explain them our projects, answer their questions and concerns relating the issue.

We attach a link to a video were the ADAS group leader, Dr. Antonio Lopez, explains a little about the project to the local TV (Barcelona Televisió, BTV):

http://www.cvc.uab.es/?page_id=113&id=231


  • 0

Poster Award for “GPU-based pedestrian detection for autonomous driving”

Victor Campmany an ADAS group student obtained the 2n best Poster Award for the poster “GPU-based pedestrian detection for autonomous driving” at Programming and Tunning Massively Parallel Systems at PUMPS Summer School, July 6-10, 2015 that was organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, HiPEAC


  • 0

CERCA Conference

For the 2nd edition of the CERCA Conference, celebrated on May 28th and 29th the Computer Vision Center exposed the electric car used to develop the algorithms based on computer vision to get an autonomous car.

During the event the Conseller Mas Colell had the opportunity to talk with the researchers who explained the project and answered his questions. We leave you the links to the news related to this event: