International Success of UO Researchers

In the first of them, they focused on the object detection and tracking of cars and pedestrians on videos taken from vehicles. We need to keep in mind that the artificial intelligence is an area where inventive methods are usually outperformed shortly after their publication. It is an area where special computers worth millions of crowns are used to train huge neural networks. And it is also an area where entire teams hunting for financial rewards of the competitions’ organizers have moved to. Despite all this, Petr Hurtík and Marek Vajgl from IRAFM (Institute for Research and Application of Fuzzy Modeling of the University of Ostrava) managed to end up second in such competition with their own method and using a common desktop computer.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic they were not able to travel to Tokio for the ceremony, however, they focused on the many positive impacts their participation had, for example, they got new contacts and received an offer from a company dealing with the artificial intelligence in medicine. Ever since, their method has also been shared and discussed. At the Department of Informatics and Computers UO, there is a new course called Introduction to Deep Learning taught together with Honza Hůla and the students will be able to take part in other competitions as part of their semestral projects.

The task of the second competition was to detect the coastline in images taken from the Japanese satellite ALOS-2 orbiting more than 630 km above the ground. This time, the researchers took another member from Japan to the team. The competition lasted for three months, over 800 competitors registered for it and more than 2,700 solutions were sent for evaluation. The total of 2 million Japanese yen was distributed among the awarded projects. Their final solution helped them to end up on the second place.

Congratulations to Petr Hurtík and Marek Vajgl!

Updated: 16. 02. 2021