PhD Position in Real-time Situational Awareness with On-body Visual Sensors

The PhD candidate will work within the framework of the NTP research project Enigma. This project involves cooperation between TU/e, the video-analysis company ViNotion and the R&D center of a Dutch Ministry. The general goal of the project is to enable situational awareness for officers (actors) during indoor inspection operations. Actors will be equipped with visual and other sensors providing the data for on-the-fly analysis of the surroundings. The analysis should provide actors sufficient information for forming a local and global situational awareness of the surroundings building structure. The project is subject to specific governmental constraints, therefore only EU citizens can apply for this PhD position.

The goal of the PhD candidate is to research and develop methods to process the data from the on-body visual sensors and to reconstruct the map (either 2D or 3D) of the surroundings on the fly. At the same time, the location and orientation of the moving actor should be instantly computed. Another goal is the analysis and detection of areas of interest, which are specific for each type of inspection. Scientific challenge here is that the actors carrying the sensors can move fast and in unpredictable way.

For this project, a candidate with MSc degree in Electrical or Computer Engineering will be selected and hired as a doctoral student in the VCA Research Group of the Signal Processing Systems Dept. for a 4-year period. The candidate should have profound background knowledge in image processing, experience in working with multi-view geometry and excellent programming skills. Experience with SLAM, depth data and point-cloud data processing is highly desired. Besides this, we favour some experience with deep learning neural networks. Candidates should also have reasonable skills in academic writing, possess good communication skills and should be able to cooperate in a multidisciplinary team.

The PhD student will be working in the Video Coding Architecture research group (http://vca.ele.tue.nl ) in the Department of Electrical Engineering at TU/e. The Department of Electrical Engineering is one of the nine departments of the Eindhoven University of Technology and provides BSc and MSc programs in Electrical Engineering. The department has nine large research groups and has research collaborations with other departments at the Eindhoven University of Technology as well as with a large number of other universities and companies, both within The Netherlands and internationally. The Electrical Engineeringfaculty has approximately 300employees and over 1000 students.