Alternance: Haptics Signal Encoding at InterDigital in Rennes

Job description

Alternance: Sensing signal encoding InterDigital is looking for a student to join its team of researchers and engineers working on extending current research on haptics to more broad sensing technologies. The candidate will join the Interactive Media team to work on haptics & sensing encoding in a standardization context. The position will consist in studying the state of the art in sensing signal compression and propose new methods to improve current encoding standards. Part of the job will also consist in developing proof of concepts and demos to tests new solutions. Context The recent democratization of virtual reality has strongly re-invigorated the research and development on haptic technologies. This growing interest in the haptic community resulted in the release of numerous haptic products, including new consumer devices, authoring tools and plenty of haptic enabled VR experiences. However, this wide range of available haptic devices and haptic tools gave birth to a multitude of proprietary formats which make interoperability problematic. This slows down market adoption and raises the need for providing standardized formats and methods to encode and decode haptic signals. To address this limitation, two major standard organizations are currently working on coded representations of haptic data. Interdigital is especially involved in the standardization process of haptics through the ISO/IEC MPEG-I standard. This standard provides a first base for encoding both PCM and parametric signals for a variety of haptic modalities (vibrotactile, temperature, force, electrotactile, …). Haptics can be seen as one of the different sensing technologies, therefore InterDigital is currently looking at extending the concepts proposed and studied during the MPEG Haptics work for sensing at large. The concepts of graph and parametric signals can certainly be adapted to other sensing modalities. Main Goal The goal of the position will be to review existing sensing technologies (devices, signals, encoding) and propose new signal processing solutions and new parametric representations to encode different sensing modalities. Part of the work will consist in developing proof of concepts using state of the art technology (inc. completing the haptic devices from the lab, a robot arm and a haptic chair). Objectives The main tasks conducted in this job will be: 1. Study the state of the art of sensing signal representation formats and compression. 2. Study existing sensing standards, if exists. 3. Compare these standards using different objective metrics 4. Propose improved methods to encode and decode sensing signals 5. Develop proof of concepts to showcase the proposed solutions using some prototypes 6. Conduct user evaluations to ensure the viability of the proposed methods. About InterDigital InterDigital develops fundamental wireless and video technologies that are at the core of consumer devices, networks, and services worldwide. We solve many of the industry's most critical and complex technical challenges, providing solutions for more efficient broadband networks and a richer multimedia experience years ahead of market deployment. InterDigital has strategic relationships with many of the world's leading wireless and video companies. Founded in 1972, InterDigital is listed on NASDAQ and is included in the S&P SmallCap 600 Index. The Team The Interactive Media team is a team of highly motivated, fast paced, and highly skilled researchers with strong backgrounds in Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, media content representation & coding, Interaction, and Extended Reality related to avatar representation and haptics. We actively participate in state-of-the-art future standards development activities in international standardization organizations such as ISO/IEC/MPEG, ITU-T/SG16, 3GPP SA4 and Khronos. About You You have a track record on one or several of the following domains or performed your studies in one or several of these