The seminar of OBELIX team is currently held on thursdays 11:30 am, every two weeks, at the IRISA lab, Tohannic campus (bat. ENSIBS). Usually, the presentation lasts 30 min and is followed by a discussion with the team.
The seminar is coordinated by Yann CABANES: Please contact me for any information or if you want to present your work to our team.
Previous seminars
2019 / 2019-20 / 2020-21 / 2021-22 / 2022-23 / 2023-24 / 2024-25
Upcoming seminars (2024-25)
- Date: Thursday, April 24, 2025 at 11:30 a.m.
- Room: A102, ENSIBS Vannes
- Speaker: Lucie Laporte-Devylder
- Title: Seeing the Unseen: A Thermal Perspective on Marine Mammal Monitoring
- Abstract: In this seminar, I will present ongoing work as part of WildDrone, a multidisciplinary EU MSCA project leveraging drone technology to address biodiversity challenges. While the project develops advanced machine learning tools for automation, my focus as a biologist is on translating these innovations into field-ready methods for marine mammal monitoring. Traditional monitoring techniques, such as GPS tagging, can be invasive and limited in scope. Advances in drone technology and infrared (IR) imaging now offer promising, non-invasive alternatives. IR enables both direct detection of marine mammals via thermal signatures, and indirect detection through flukeprints and other water disturbances. Yet, the underlying mechanisms influencing these thermal cues, their environmental dependencies, and their utility for species identification, age classification, and behavioral tracking remain largely unexplored. In 2024, I conducted drone-based field trials in La Réunion during the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) breeding season, using thermal and RGB cameras to assess the reliability of flukeprints for detection and tracking. My next campaign in May 2025 will expand this work to Arctic environments, exploring how thermal cue characteristics shift across climates. Looking forward, this research opens key opportunities for computer vision applications. These include automated detection of thermal tracks, diffusion-based modeling to estimate whale time-of-passage, and real-time species or individual identification using visual features from drone imagery. By bridging marine biology, drone sensing, and machine learning, this work aims to unlock new tools for non-invasive marine mammal monitoring and catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration in conservation science.
- Date: Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 11:30 a.m.
- Room: A102, ENSIBS Vannes
- Speaker: Anne Gagneux
- Title: Plug-and-Play methods: theory and practice
- Abstract: In image restoration, PnP methods leverage the strength of trainable denoisers by integrating them in existing optimization schemes. First, we will show how to leverage generative models to create new denoisers. Specifically, we introduce the PnPFlow algorithm, a PnP method based on Flow Matching. In the second part of the talk, we will study desirable properties of PnP denoisers that ensure convergence of the associated iterative schemes. In particular, we provide an in-depth study of necessary and sufficient conditions for a neural network to be convex, beyond the traditional Input Convex Neural Network (ICNN) architecture.
