About this position
Do you get excited about working with the latest and greatest computer vision research, while also working on something meaningful? At TNO Intelligent Imaging we develop and demonstrate AI algorithms for the well-being and safety of our society. With your research during this internship, you will have the opportunity to seriously advance our AI capabilities in maritime operations, by utilizing your creativity and programming skills in a passionate team of scientists. The internship focusses on the applications of large-scale pretrained foundation models to identify ships in images. The appearance of ships in camera recordings at sea may be degraded due to atmospheric effects and the typically large observation distances. The question is how we can identify the ships in such low-quality images, when the reference data consists of high-quality ship images. There may be several solutions to this challenge. A foundation model can be adapted to match images of ships across different (quality) domains, bridging the gap between high quality photographs and realistic low-quality images. Furthermore, GANs or diffusion based few-shot translation methods may be applied to make high quality images look like low quality ones. However, we also encourage you to come up with your own solutions for this challenge!
What will be your role?
During this internship, you will investigate novel approaches to better perform image matching/identification or retrieval with foundation models across a large domain gap. You will start by studying the current state-of-the-art in foundation models, image retrieval, and domain adaptation techniques. You will then explore new methods for identification across domains, trying to improve over our existing baseline. Your insights have potential to make a real impact, and you are encouraged to write a scientific paper on your findings.
You will perform this assignment within TNO’s Intelligent Imaging department. The Intelligent Imaging department is a passionate, creative, and dedicated team of professionals (60 people) specialized in developing groundbreaking applications in the field of computer vision. Our team members have diverse backgrounds, ranging from the medical field to artificial intelligence. Intelligent Imaging is a young and growing department which has built up a lot of expertise over the past years in AI and deep learning.
What we expect from you
You are in the final stages of your master's degree in artificial intelligence, computer science, physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, or a similar degree. Prior experience with computer vision, image analysis, programming (Python), artificial intelligence/deep learning is appreciated.
Your supervision team will consist of two experienced TNO-colleagues who are actively involved in ongoing research projects at TNO. They have experience with state-of-the-art foundation models, classical computer vision, image analysis, and artificial intelligence research, as well as supervising students in internships and graduate projects.
Please include the following practical information in your cover letter:
What you'll get in return
You want an internship opportunity on the precursor of your career; an internship gives you an opportunity to take a good look at your prospective future employer. TNO goes a step further. It’s not just looking that interests us; you and your knowledge are essential to our innovation. That’s why we attach a great deal of value to your personal and professional development. You will, of course, be properly supervised during your work placement and be given the scope for you to get the best out of yourself. Furthermore, we provide: