Waldir Pimenta, who successfully completed the MEI in Dec.2010, is among the six finalists of the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge, a contest organized by the Fraunhofer AICOS research center that challenges students and researchers of Portuguese universities to present innovative ideas and with practical utility, in the areas of Information Technology and Communication, Multimedia and other similar sciences.
Waldir proposes a new form of facial recognition, which makes this process quicker and more efficient. From an image of a face, this system separates elements like the pose, the shape of the face, and the facial expressions, manipulating them individually. Thus, it is possible to maintain the shape of the face and to "normalize" the pose and facial expressions, facilitating and streamlining the challenging task of face recognition. All this work was developed within Waldir's master dissertation, supervised by Luís Paulo Santos, a professor at UMinho.
The contest Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge will have its closing event on October 20 in the premises of AICOS in Porto, where they will be assigned the 1st, 2nd and 3rd places in each category (doctoral and masters), and will be distributed a total of EUR 9,000.
17.10.2011
