Prof. Dr.-Ing. Geovanni Martinez

Coordinator

 
Address:

IPCV-LAB
Escuela de Ingeniería Eléctrica
Apartado Postal 11501-2060 UCR
San José, Costa Rica
Central America
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Phone: ++506 2511 2631
Fax: ++506 2511 3920
Email: geovanni.martinez@ucr.ac.cr

 
Short biography:

Geovanni Martínez received his Doktor-Ingenieur degree (Dr.-Ing.) from the Institut fuer Theoretische Nachrichtentechnik und Informationsverarbeitung (TNT) of the University of Hannover, Germany, in 1998. His doctoral thesis was on computer vision-based human shape, motion and color estimation for very low bit rate video compression. His thesis supervisor was Prof. Dr.-Ing. H.-G. Musmann. From August 2000 to June 2002, he conducted postdoctoral research work on computer vision-based human motion estimation for teleoperation of a humanoid space robot called ROBONAUT at the University of Houston and NASA Johnson Space Center. In 1997 he joined the faculty of the University of Costa Rica, where he is now a full professor. He is the founder and coordinator of the Image Processing and Computer Vision Research Laboratory (IPCV-LAB). He is currently working on a computer vision-based algorithm, known as monocular NIR ToF odometry, capable of determining the position and orientation of an exploration robot from the multiprocessing of two signals, a monocular near-infrared (NIR) video signal and a time-of-flight (ToF) depth signal, both provided by a NIR ToF camera rigidly attached on the side of a robot facing the terrain, and is also extending it to simultaneously map the location the robot has passed through, in order to transform it into a monocular NIR ToF simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm, often referred to as monocular NIR ToF SLAM. He also has research experience in computer vision-based monitoring of biological processes using in-situ microscopy and in computer vision-based inspection for the semiconductor and food industries. Early in his academic career, he had the opportunity to work on the design, implementation and testing of flexible, low cost, and expandable digital private automatic branch exchange (PABX) systems. He has numerous publications in international refereed and indexed conferences and journals. In 2002 the Costa Rican government awarded him the Clodomiro Picado Twight National Technology Award for his outstanding trajectory in the area of technological research. In 2010 he received the Researcher Award from the University of Costa Rica for his contributions to the technological development of the country. He is now looking for a new collaboration opportunity to take his research in monocular NIR ToF odometry and SLAM to the next level which is to test them on real robots of the new generation of solar system exploration robots, especially lunar and Martian exploration robots.

Video about the IPCV-LAB (in spanish)