Perceptual and Cognitive Systems



 

The research in this area covers:

  • Biometrics: novelties in learning architectures and the improvement of the several facial recognition systems;
  • Improvement of the security of visual content: achieving good accuracy in printer-proof steganography with applications in the security of ID documents;
  • Analysis of endoscopic imagery for computer assisted surgery and diagnosis;
  • Analysis of images from capsule endoscopy for computer assisted diagnosis;
  • Analysis of images from deformable objects;
  • Solutions to incorporate causality and counterfactual inference principles in deep learning to enhance their interpretability, namely, Causal Representation Learning, Counterfactual Learning and Knowledge Distillation.

Projects



Publications


D. Rocha, P. Lopes, P. Peixoto, A. de Almeida, M. Tavakoli, Miniaturized Liquid Metal Composite Circuits with Energy Harvesting Coils for Battery-Free Bioelectronics and Optogenetics, Advanced Functional Materials, Volume 35, Issue 13, 2025
P. Vicente de Almeida, R. P. Rocha, AI-powered social robot for cognitive stimulation in the elderly through personalized storytelling, 2025 11th International Conference on Automation, Robotics, and Applications (ICARA 2025), 122-126, IEEE RAS, Zagreb, Croatia, 2025
Lucyanno Frota, R. P. Rocha, A semantic mapping framework for service robots, Proceedings of the 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 25), 832–839, ACM, Catania, Italy, 2025
Ana Pinto, Leticia Lemos, Carla Carvalho, Joana Santos, P. Menezes, Tatsuya Nomura, Translation, Adaptation, and Validation in Portuguese of an Acceptance Scale for Human–Robot Interaction in an Industrial Context, Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, Wiley, 2025
André Araújo, Carlos A. P. Pizzino, M. S. Couceiro, R. P. Rocha, A Multi-Drone System Proof of Concept for Forestry Applications, Drones, 9, 80, MDPI, 2025
J. P. Barreto, A. Ribeiro, A Parallel Computing Platform for Arthroscopic Video Synchronization in Augmented Reality Surgery Applications, 2, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, 2024, Supervised by
T. Barros da Silva, L. Artur da Silva Garrote, M. J. Coombes, , C. Premebida, U. J. Nunes, PointNetPGAP-SLC: A 3D LiDAR-Based Place Recognition Approach With Segment-Level Consistency Training for Mobile Robots in Horticulture, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 9, Issue: 11, 2024
Jose Lourenco, Goncalo Arsenio, L. Artur da Silva Garrote, U. J. Nunes, , Multimodal 6D Detection of Industrial Pallets, in Real and Virtual Environments, with Applications in Industrial AMRs, In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics , Vol. 2: ICINCO; ISBN 978-989-758-717-7, SciTePress, 2024
E. Borges, L. Artur da Silva Garrote, U. J. Nunes, A Modular Multimodal Multi-Object Tracking-by-Detection Approach, with Applications in Outdoor and Indoor Environments, In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics , Vol. 2: ICINCO; ISBN 978-989-758-717-7, SciTePress, 2024
R. Bettencourt, U. J. Nunes, M. Castelo-Branco, G. Pires, Searching for Neurophysiological Biomarkers Correlated with BCI Performance in a Completely Locked-In State Patient, 11th Int. Conf. on Software Development for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI 2024), 2024
R. Araújo, Antonio Pedro Aguiar, Nuno Lau, Soft Computing, 2024
W. Moreira Cardoso, T. Barros da Silva, G. Goncalves, C. Premebida, U. J. Nunes, Multispectral Image Segmentation in Agriculture: Evaluating Deep Learning Models with Train-Test Split and Cross-Validation Strategies, 7th Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT), Madrid - Spain, 2024
Joao Jorge, T. Barros da Silva, C. Premebida, M. Aleksandrov, Daniel Goehring, U. J. Nunes, Impact of 3D LiDAR Resolution in Graph-Based SLAM Approaches: A Comparative Study, 7th Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT), Madrid - Spain, 2024
B. Jin, N. Gonçalves, L. Cruz, I. Medvedev, Yuanyu Yu, Jiujiang Wang, , Simulated multimodal deep facial diagnosis, Expert Systems with Applications, 2024
T. Barros da Silva, C. Premebida, Stephanie Aravecchia, Cedric Pradalier, U. J. Nunes, SPVSoAP3D: A Second-order Average Pooling Approach to enhance 3D Place Recognition in Horticultural Environments, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2024