The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft undertakes applied research of direct utility to private and public enterprise and of wide benefit to society. Its services are solicited by customers and contractual partners in industry, the service sector and public administration. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft maintains 56 Research Institutes, at over 40 different locations throughout Germany.

Image Processing Department

The Fraunhofer HHI Building

The Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) is located in Berlin. It is a leading research institute in the fields of mobile broadband communications, photonic networks, and electronic imaging for multimedia. The Image Processing department of this institute has a long experience in signal, image, and video processing. About 55 researchers in about 25 research projects are working in fields related to multimedia and cover the entire chain from the capturing, analysis,  encoding, streaming, interaction, and visualization of 2D and 3D content. The applications range from mobile services to digital cinema, HDTV, and beyond, 3DTV, immersive tele-presence, scene and face analysis, as well as augmented reality systems. It covers all fields from algorithm development to chip and systems design. Fraunhofer HHI is also renowned for its leading role in video coding standardisation within ISO/IEC MPEG, ITU-T VCEG, DVB and IETF. In addition, it was member of several European research projects of the COST, EUREKA, RACE, ACTS, ESPRIT, and IST programmes. Selected EU projects the Image Processing department participates or participated are: VISNET/VISNET2, 3DTV, RUSHES, Games@Large (all FP6), and 3D4YOU, 2020 3DMEDIA, MOBILE 3DTV, 3D PHONE, 3D Presence, SEA, OMP, MAGIC (all FP7). In addition, HHI is leading two major German national research initiatives: The research project PRIME, which deals with 3D production technologies for film and broadcasting and the Core Technology Cluster of the project THESEUS, in which semantic technologies for the future Internet of Services are developed.

Within the Image Processing department, the activities of 3D video analysis and synthesis are of particular interest for this project. There exist a substantial expertise in multi-view capturing including synchronisation and calibration. Several algorithms for scene structure estimation from multi-view data have been developed as well as full 3D model reconstruction methods. Another important research area is the analysis and tracking of dynamic objects, people, bodies, faces, expressions, and gestures from monocular and multi-view sequences. These algorithms have been incorporated in application like real-time avatar animations, virtual conferencing, and augmentedreality based virtual try on of clothes and shoes. Finally, activities in visualization of 2D and 3D image data ranging from high resolution multi projection, image-based rendering, as well as novel view synthesis will be of beneficial use for this project.

Interactive Media – Human Factors Department

Fraunhofer HHI’s Interactive Media – Human Factors Department pursues research and development of innovative concepts for multimedia and multimodal communications of the future. Its main challenge is the design of next generation terminal interfaces, systems and applications that allow users an attractive and user-friendly access to multimedia data and interactive services.

HHI’s Interactive Media – Human Factors department’s core competences lie in the fields of:

• usability, accessibility and acceptance for different user groups by means of user-centred design and user studies (laboratory tests and field trials)
• intuitive multimodal user interfaces, incl. touchless gestural interfaces
• non-intrusive (mainly camera-based) smart devices for analysing or “sensing” users’ eyes, gaze, fingers, and gestures
• autostereoscopic 3D displays
• presence awareness for distributed groups, among other things, by controlling virtual humans (avatars) in 3D virtual environments.