About ViCoS

The Visual Cognitive Systems Laboratory is involved in basic research in visually enabled cognitive systems, with emphasis on visual learning and recognition.

Research in the area of visually enabled cognitive systems focuses on various theories, at different levels of abstraction, regarding requirements, architectures, forms of representation, kinds of ontologies and knowledge, and varieties of mechanisms relevant to integration and control of vision systems. In this context, cognitive vision implies functionalities for knowledge representation, learning, reasoning about events and structures, recognition and categorization, and goal specification, all of which are concerned with the semantics of the relationship between the visual agent and its environment. This requires a vast effort in a multidisciplinary understanding of cognitive processes, involving studies in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.

Applications include recognition of objects, scenes, and activities in visual cognitive tasks, such as surveillance and smart vision-based positioning using wearable computing in urban environments as well as in other applications of cognitive systems, such as mobile robots and cognitive assistants.