Dr. Georgios Athanasopoulos

Biography

Georgios Athanasopoulos received the diploma degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, University of Patras, Greece in 2004 and a postgraduate degree in Signal Processing for Telecommunications and Multimedia from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National University of Athens, Greece in 2006. In 2006-2010 he was involved as System Analyst and Technical Project Manager in the complete life-cycle of mission-critical IT projects. Since 2010, he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Department of Electronics and Informatics of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His main research interests are in the areas of audio and acoustic signal processing, sensor arrays, scene analysis, audiovisual crossmodal attention and multisensory integration.

Research Interest

Our objective in this research project is to put forward the modeling of perception (visual and auditory) as a complex attentional mechanism that embodies a decision making process. The task of the latter is to find a trade-off between the reliability of the sensorial stimuli and the plausibility of prior knowledge. The cross-modal integration of visual and auditory data and interaction is beneficial as each modality provides partial information about different aspects of world objects and events. The combination of these modalities is important in understanding how they complement each other to provide unambiguous information, how they transform their inputs into knowledge and meaning, and how they control behavior. In the scope of this research project, we aim at designing an audiovisual system which shall be able to localize in space, identify and track over time an object that can be seen and heard simultaneously. Audiovisual Focus of Attention systems are particularly interesting in context-aware applications such as Human-Robot interaction, audio-visual speaker diarisation, audio-visual processing in meeting, multimedia indexing, as well as event analysis for surveillance applications. The audiovisual system of living creatures provides useful information about the world. For humans, it means to be able to focus one's attention on events, such as e.g. a person talking, and ignore the rest of the interfering sources. In this research project, our objective is the development of computational techniques capable of imitating this behavior.