News

The Speech@FIT group achieves another great success in an international competition. Its members, Shuai Wang and Hossein Zeinali, received award certificates for the first place in the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC) at workshop in Graz. Its aim is to evaluate how well can contemporary methods be used for recognition of speakers in various environments; the participants in the competition were tasked to recognise speakers in the audio track of certain recordings. The VoxCeleb database contains several hundreds of thousands of videos including several thousand recordings of celebrities; the videos range from professionally edited recordings to informal videos containing laughter or noise in the background. 

The objective of the new Czech-Israeli research co-operation is to find new methods for visual geo-location or estimation of depth from an image. The research grant was awarded to the team of Martin Čadík from FIT and the team of Professor Yosi Keller from Bar Ilan University. Together, the two teams will use the convolution neural networks to develop a new registration algorithm and descriptor of 2.5D and 3D models, a new method for localisation of cameras in the natural environment and a multimodal dataset for training networks predicting depth from a single image.

If the researchers manage to develop these new methods, the results of the joint research could advance the development of computational photography and could also be of some use in medicine or security.

The international project will last for three years. Its Czech part is financed by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, the Israeli part by the Ministry of Science and Technology Israel.

In November, the Rector of BUT will present the awards for two best teachers at the faculty - Tomáš Milet for Bachelor's programmes and Milan Češka for Master's programmes. These two teachers have received the most votes from students in the best teacher survey for the academic year 2018/2019. In May, the competition was announced by the Rector of BUT with the support of the Academic Senate; the awards will be presented at the Academic Assembly in November. Congratulations to the winners and all the teachers ranked among the best according to the survey and many thanks to the students for voting. Complete results are available HERE.