Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

The aim of drone cinematography is to develop innovative intelligent single- and multiple-drone platform for media production to cover outdoor events (e.g., sports) that are typically distributed over large expanses, ranging, for example, from a stadium to an entire city.  The drone or drone team, to be managed by the production director and his/her production crew, will have: a) increased multiple drone decisional autonomy, hence allowing event coverage in the time span of around one hour in an outdoor environment and b) improved multiple drone robustness and safety mechanisms (e.g., communication robustness/safety, embedded flight regulation compliance, enhanced crowd avoidance and emergency landing mechanisms), enabling it to carry out its mission against errors or crew inaction and to handle emergencies. Such robustness is particularly important, as the drones will operate close to crowds and/or may face environmental hazards (e.g., wind). Therefore, it must be contextually aware and adaptive, towards maximizing shooting creativity and productivity, while minimizing production costs. Drone vision plays an important role towards this end, covering the following topics: a) drone visual mapping and localization, b) drone visual analysis for target/obstacle/crowd/POI detection, c) 2D/3D target tracking, d) privacy protection technologies in drones (face de-identification). This keynote lecture will offer an overview of all the above plus other related topics.

Prof. I. Pitas (ioannis.pitas@bristol.ac.uk, pitas@aiia.csd.auth.gr, PhD, IEEE fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, EURASIP fellow) is Professor at the EE Department, University of Bristol, UK and Professor at the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.  His current interests are in the areas of image/video processing, intelligent digital media, machine learning, human centered interfaces, affective computing, computer vision, 3D imaging and biomedical imaging. He has published over 850 papers, contributed in 44 books in his areas of interest and edited or (co-)authored another 11 books. He has also been member of the program committee of many scientific conferences and workshops. In the past he served as Associate Editor or co-Editor of eight international journals and General or Technical Chair of four international conferences. He participated in 68 R&D projects, primarily funded by the European Union and is/was principal investigator/researcher in 40 such projects. He has 25250+ citations to his work and h-index 75+ (Google Scholar).