The goal of the Vertiports project, funded by EFRO GTI West-Vlaanderen, is to develop a functional airlift (including workflow and test flights) from Ostend to a wind farm so that infrastructure inspection at sea can be carried out by an unmanned aircraft, as well as to goods transport to and from the wind farms with drones instead of vessels.
The project focus will be on issues needed to establish an operational airlift: making drones fly further and longer (is hydrogen a valid energy source for drones?), making drones operate in all weather conditions (what works in rain and wind), and how can all this be done in a regulatory, safe and efficient manner?
IPI's role in the project is to develop a hyperspectral payload and software workflow for measurements in the North Sea.
EFRO, 1/2024 - 12/2026
The IMultiple Lasers and Integrated Cameras for Increasing Trustworthy Yields (MultipLICITY) project aims to address the challenges of 3D printing, which is used to create a variety of products, from car parts to medical implants and custom-made tools. Unfortunately, a sizable percentage of these components still show defects, caused by insufficiently sophisticated quality monitoring of the printing process. The MultipLICITY project aims to improve the quality of 3D printed products, reduce waste, and save energy.
ICON project, 9/2022 - 8/2024
The SafeNav maritime safety project promises a path towards safer and more secure navigation for the navigator on the bridge today and then moving towards remote-operated and autonomous shipping. One key aspect to boost maritime safety is accurate and efficient detection and tracking of vessels and floating objects as well as marine mammals, in order to avoid navigational hazards such as collisions and subsequent damages to ships, crew members and the marine environment.
In SafeNav, IPI will use innovative sensor setups, including cameras to solve the main challenge = to improve the detection performance in difficult conditions: distant or semi-submerged marine animals or containers, waves crests and sun glitters, poor weather conditions.
EU-HORIZON, 9/2022 - 8/2025
The SeaDetect project, part of Europe's LIFE initiative, aims to halt the biodiversity loss due to collisions between ships and cetaceans by implementing and developing new technologies. To considerably reduce this risk of collision and protect marine life and biodiversity, the SeaDetect project aims to develop two innovative, complementary systems. The first is a detection system to be deployed on ships composed of multiple highly sensitive sensors, of which the data will be fused and processed with artificial intelligence in order to detect cetaceans up to 1km. The second is a network of Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) buoys that will detect and triangulate the position of cetaceans in real-time in order to prevent collision for all vessels in usual maritime roads.
IPI's role in the project is to develop novel detection algorithms based on raw data fusion to improve the detection capabilities of the on-board systems.
EU-LIFE, 9/2022 - 8/2026
Building Information Modelling (BIM) allows making elaborate, information-rich models of building designs. However, there is no easy way yet to couple these models to what is actually happening on-site, during a construction. The BoB project aims to create a 2-way link between BIM models and the actual building, improving building efficiency and avoiding costly errors
IPI researches camera networks and cross-modal 3D matching to link on-site camera images with 4D BIM models to estimate construction progress in highly challenging environments.
ICON project, 1/2022 – 12/2023
Holographic Skeletons for Wrist Surgery: The goal of HoloWrist is to use augmented reality to accurately show the location of a patient's wrist bones during surgery. This will be done by creating a hologram of the patient's wrist bones (e.g. from their CT scan) and using augmented reality headsets (e.g. Microsoft's HoloLens) to display the hologram on the patient's wrist.
IPI's focus is on motion tracking to ensure the hologram is aligned to the patient throughout the surgery.
FWO, 1/2022 – 12/2024
The goal of VISION2REUSE is to demonstrate the potential of smart cameras for the automatic monitoring of the quality of reusable packaging in the food and packaging industry. Based on these camera technologies and state-of-the-art machine learning, it will be measured in an accurate and fast way whether the packaging material in question is still suitable for a new reuse cycle or whether it should go to a dedicated end-of-life stream (e.g. recycling).
REACT-EU EFRO, 1/2022 - 12/2023
NextPerception aims to develop next generation smart perception sensors and enhance the distributed intelligence paradigm to build versatile, secure, reliable, and proactive human monitoring solutions for the health, wellbeing, and automotive domains
IPI investigates cooperative sensor fusion in support of safety and comfort at road intersections especially for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and bikers
ECSEL JU, 5/2020 – 4/2023
Groundbreaking artificial intelligence research enabling a meaningful impact on people, industry and society. IPI researches real-time and power-efficient AI in the edge for various applications.
National project (Flemish EWI), 7/2019 – present