Prof. Dr. Hilko Cords

• Simulation and Agents
• Media Computing
• Game Design and Development
• Workshop Spatial Computing
• Supervisor for Master’s Students
• Supervisor for Student Projects and Bachelor-Theses

LinkedIn

Augmented Reality for Manufacturing of Radiopharmaceuticals
Manufacturing of radiopharmaceuticals is performed daily according to and controlled by formal regulations and standardized operation procedures, instructing the operator on how to perform and document tasks and defining steps leading to the drug product - a perfect target for automation.
The general goal of this project is the provision of augmented reality solutions, increasing manufacturing reliability, process-quality and -documentation while simultaneously, reducing preparatory and documentation time and the number of batch-failures. Additionally, our research focuses on computer vision approaches to automatically control and document process steps and failures during the manufacturing process. More… 

Accurate and Fast Light Propagation of Real World Lighting Systems
Light is an integral part of architecture and is strongly considered within the design of interior spaces. Professional lighting designer employ dedicated software products to design a lighting plan, which are usually expensive, complex to use and non-interactive. In collaboration with a lighting manufacturer, we elaborate an interactive, web-based and yet physics-based light simulation and visualization. Thus, user configured light setups are visualized accurately according to photometric data and hence, convey an intuitive impression of the related light distribution within a specific room. More...

3d Body Scanning and Virtual Measurements of Human Body
On average, fashion buyers return more than 30% of online purchased clothing. This habit is causing economic and ecological damage, especially since fashion is the largest global B2C e-commerce market segment. Surveys show that e-consumers key challenges are the determination of the preferred size and fit of a garment and the anticipation of the look and feel on their bodies.
Addressing this problem, this project set out to solve the fashion size, fit and look challenge by measuring body dimensions using depth cameras. We investigate 3d digital avatar creation as well as elaborated approaches working directly on point clouds. The virtual data-sets are measured, fashion size is determined and a virtual preview is generated within a virtual showroom. 

Highly Configurable Lighting Systems
Modern, professional lighting systems enable complex and individual configurations. Usually, these are designed specifically according to customer requirements. Unfortunately, the flexibility and configurability of these system solutions are usually represented only insufficiently within the manufacturer’s web configurators. That’s because each lighting system demands for very specific and manufacturer-dependent configuration parameters. In this project, we investigate web-based configuration solutions enabling intuitive, general and flexible setups of lighting systems. In our research, we focus on the abstraction of configuration logic and an intuitive user experience. More...

Checkout-Free Shopping Environments
Our partner provides a checkout-free shopping solution based on computer vision, ML and sensor fusion. The solution determines which client took what within retail environments - fully automatically and without any interaction involved - including check-in, product recognition and payment. Thereby, the collection of suitable training data for the applied ML-algorithms is a time consuming and expensive process including the aggregation of multiple data sources.
We investigate the feasibility of generating synthetic data-sets for automatizing and simplifying the above mentioned process of data generation. By employing a virtual representation of the entire physical setup and generating synthetic training data-sets, different environments, products and sensor-setups can be tested and installed efficiently. More...

Temporal Mapping of Human Skin Temperature Changes
Current research in the field of medical imaging indicate that tracking the relative temperature changes over time may lead to diagnostic insights into various diseases including circulatory disorders and rheumatoid arthritis. We explore the possibilities of computer vision algorithms applied to time varying image sequences for diagnostic purposes. By utilizing IR-cameras, we monitor the reheating effects of the vascular system in fingers applying computer vision algorithms for localization and quantifying the relative temperature changes. Thus, the course of a disease can be monitored and recorded and we investigate the possibilities of application for diagnosis. More...

Interactive Spatial Augmented Reality
Based on fusion of depth, IR and RGB sensors, we develop a projection based mixed reality table environment including touch detection and object tracking. Thus, visualizations and simulations on real paper and normal tables are feasible, following the paradigm of Calm Computing. By tracking additional tokens, we create a full, tangible user interface, allowing for new approaches in the design of human-computer interactions. More...