Abstract: Multi-spectral RGB-NIR sensors have become ubiquitous in recent years. These sensors allow the visible and near-infrared spectral bands of a given scene to be captured at the same time. With such cameras, the acquired imagery has a compromised RGB color representation due to near-infrared bands (700–1100 nm) cross-talking with the visible bands (400–700 nm). This paper proposes two deep learning-based architectures to recover the full RGB color images, thus removing the NIR information from the visible bands. The proposed approaches directly restore the high-resolution RGB image by means of convolutional neural networks. They are evaluated with several outdoor images; both architectures reach a similar performance when evaluated in different scenarios and using different similarity metrics. Both of them improve the state of the art approaches.

Abstract: This paper describes a method for on-line movement identification, oriented to patient’s movement evaluation during physiotherapy. An analysis based on Mahalanobis distance between temporal windows is performed to identify the “idle/motion” state, which defines the beginning and end of the patient’s movement, for posterior patterns extraction based on Relative Wavelet Energy from sequences of invariant moments.

Abstract: This paper describes an exploratory study on group interaction with a robot-guide in an open large-scale busy environment. For an entire week a humanoid robot was deployed in the popular Cosmocaixa Science Museum in Barcelona and guided hundreds of people through the museum facilities. The main goal of this experience is to study in the wild the episodes of the robot guiding visitors to a requested destination focusing on the group behavior during displacement. The walking behavior follow-me and the face to face communication in a populated environment are analyzed in terms of guide- visitors interaction, grouping patterns and spatial formations. Results from observational data show that the space configurations spontaneously formed by the robot guide and visitors walking together did not always meet the robot communicative and navigational requirements for successful guidance. Therefore additional verbal and nonverbal prompts must be considered to regulate effectively the walking together and follow-me behaviors. Finally, we discuss lessons learned and recommendations for robot’s spatial behavior in dense crowded scenarios.

Abstract: This article describes an exploratory study of social human-robot interaction with the experimental robotic platform MASHI. The experiences were carried out in La B`obila Cultural Center in Barcelona, Spain to study the visitor preferences, characterize the groups and their spatial relationships in this open and unstructured environment. Results showed that visitors prefers to play and dialogue with the robot. Children have the highest interest in interacting with the robot, more than young and adult visitors. Most of the groups consisted of more than 3 visitors, however the size of the groups during interactions was continuously changed. In static situations, the observed spatial relationships denotes a social cohesion in the human-robot interactions.

Abstract: Los drones o aeronaves no tripuladas son muy útiles para la adquisición de imágenes, de forma mucho más simple que los satélites o aviones. Sin embargo, las imágenes adquiridas por drones deben ser combinadas de alguna forma para convertirse en información de valor sobre un terreno o cultivo. Existen diferentes programas que reciben imágenes y las combinan en una sola imagen, cada uno con diferentes características (rendimiento, precisión, resultados, precio, etc.). En este estudio se revisaron diferentes programas de código abierto para fusión de imágenes, con el ?n de establecer cuál de ellos es más útil, especí?camente para ser utilizado por pequeños y medianos agricultores en Ecuador. Los resultados pueden ser de interés para diseñadores de software, ya que al utilizar código abierto, es posible modi?car e integrar los programas en un ?ujo de trabajo más simpli?cado. Además, que permite disminuir costos debido a que no requiere de pagos de licencias para su uso, lo cual puede repercutir en un mayor acceso a la tecnología para los pequeños y medianos agricultores. Como parte de los resultados de este estudio se ha creado un repositorio de acceso público con algoritmos de pre-procesamiento necesarios para manipular las imágenes adquiridas por una cámara multiespectral y para luego obtener un mapa completo en formatos RGB, CIR y NDVI.