Object Segmentation of Cluttered Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds

Airborne topographic LiDAR is an active remote sensing technology that emits near-infrared light to map objects on the Earth's surface. Derived products of LiDAR are suitable to service a wide range of applications because of their rich three-dimensional spatial information and their capacity to obtain multiple returns. However, processing point cloud data still requires a significant effort in manual editing. Certain human-made objects are difficult to detect because of their variety of shapes, irregularly-distributed point clouds, and low number of class samples. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework to automatize the detection and segmentation of objects defined by an arbitrary number of LiDAR points surrounded by clutter. Our method is based on a light version of PointNet that achieves good performance on both object recognition and segmentation tasks. The results are tested against manually delineated power transmission towers and show promising accuracy.

Automatic Reminiscence Therapy for Dementia

With people living longer than ever, the number of cases with dementia such as Alzheimer's disease increases steadily. It affects more than 46 million people worldwide, and it is estimated that in 2050 more than 100 million will be affected. While there are not effective treatments for these terminal diseases, therapies such as reminiscence, that stimulate memories from the past are recommended. Currently, reminiscence therapy takes place in care homes and is guided by a therapist or a carer. In this work, we present an AI-based solution to automatize the reminiscence therapy, which consists in a dialogue system that uses photos as input to generate questions. We run a usability case study with patients diagnosed of mild cognitive impairment that shows they found the system very entertaining and challenging. Overall, this paper presents how reminiscence therapy can be automatized by using machine learning, and deployed to smartphones and laptops, making the therapy more accessible to every person affected by dementia.