Biosketch

I was born in Athens in 1987. I received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from National Technical University of Athens in July 2012. My diploma thesis, supervised by Prof. Petros Maragos, was in estimation of Eye Gaze and emotion classification based on Active Appearance Models and using Geometrical and Pattern Recognition techniques.

Currently, I am at the final year of my Ph.D. studies at the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), under the supervision of Prof. Petros Maragos, working in the general area of computer vision, image & video processing, machine learning and their applications. Since 2013 I have been a researcher at the Computer Vision, Speech Communication and Signal Processing Group (CVSP) at NTUA working in several projects, funded by the European Union and Greek Ministry of Research and Technology, in the areas of multimedia processing for automatic video understanding and computer vision for robotics. My research interests lie primary in the fields of face modeling, visual saliency and event recognition. My research contributions include the development of a perceptually inspired spatio-temporal saliency model with applications in eye fixation prediction, human action recognition and video summarization as well as the development and integration of multisensory and multimodal robotic perception systems in several robotics applications.

Journal Publications

1. C. Werner, N. Kardaris, P. Koutras and A. Zlantintsi, P. Maragos, J. M. Bauer and K. Hauer,
   Improving gesture-based interaction between an assistive bathing robot and older adults via user training on the gestural commands,
   Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 2019.
   

2. P. P. Filntisis, N. Efthymiou, P. Koutras, G. Potamianos and P. Maragos,
   Fusing Body Posture with Facial Expressions for Joint Recognition of Affect in Child–Robot Interaction,
   IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 4011-4018, Oct. 2019.
   

3. A. Tsiami, P. Koutras, A. Katsamanis, A. Vatakis and P. Maragos,
   A behaviorally inspired fusion approach for computational audiovisual saliency modeling,
   Signal Processing: Image Com- munication, vol. 76, pp.186-200, Aug. 2019.
   

4. A. Zlatintsi, P. Koutras, G. Evangelopoulos, N. Malandrakis, N. Efthymiou, K. Pastra, A. Potamianos and P. Maragos,
   COGNIMUSE: a multimodal video database annotated with saliency, events, semantics and emotion with application to summarization,
   EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing, Aug. 2017, 2017:54.
   

5. P. Koutras and P. Maragos,
   A Perceptually based Spatio-Temporal Computational Framework for Visual Saliency Estimation,
   Signal Processing: Image Communication, vol 38, pp. 15-31, 2015.
   

Conference Publications

1. J. Hadfield, G. Chalvatzaki, P. Koutras, M. Khamassi, C. S Tzafestas and P. Maragos,
   A Deep Learning Approach for Multi-View Engagement Estimation of Children in a Child-Robot Joint Attention task,
   In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China, Nov., 2019.
   

2. N. Gkanatsios, V. Pitsikalis, P. Koutras and P. Maragos,
   Attention-Translation-Relation Network for Scalable Scene Graph Generation,
   In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Com- puter Vision Workshops (ICCVW), Seoul, Korea, Oct.-Nov., 2019.
   

3. N. Gkanatsios, V. Pitsikalis, P. Koutras, A. Zlatintsi and P. Maragos,
   Deeply Supervised Multimodal Attentional Translation Embeddings for Visual Relationship Detection,
   In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Taipei, Taiwan, Sept., 2019.
   

4. P. Koutras and P. Maragos,
   SUSiNet: See, Understand and Summarize it,
   In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), Long Beach, CA, USA, June, 2019.
   

5. G. Chalvatzaki, P. Koutras, J. Hadfield, X. S. Papageorgiou, C. S. Tzafestas and P. Maragos,
   LSTM-based network for human gait stability prediction in an intelligent robotic rollator,
   In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada, May, 2019.
   

6. N. Efthymiou, P. Koutras, P. P. Filntisis, G. Potamianos, and P. Maragos,
   Multi-view fusion for action recognition in child-robot interaction,
   In Proc. IEEE IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Athens, Greece, Oct. 2018.
   

7. J. Hadfield, P. Koutras, N. Efthymiou, G. Potamianos, C.S. Tzafestas, and P. Maragos,
   Object assembly guidance in child-robot interaction using RGB-D based 3D tracking,
   In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, Oct. 2018.
   

8. P. Koutras, G. Panagiotaropoulou, A. Tsiami and P. Maragos,
   Audio-Visual Temporal Saliency Modeling Validated by fMRI Data,
   In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, June 2018.
   

9. G. Bouritsas, P. Koutras, A. Zlatintsi and P. Maragos,
   Multimodal Visual Concept Learning with Weakly Supervised Techniques,
   In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, June 2018.
   

10. P. Koutras, A. Zlatintsi and P. Maragos,
    Exploring CNN-based architectures for Multimodal Salient Event Detection in Videos,
    In Proc. 13th IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) Workshop, Zagori, Greece, June 2018.
    

11. A. Tsiami, P. Koutras, N. Efthymiou, P. P. Filntisis, G. Potamianos, and P. Maragos,
    Multi3: Multi-sensory Perception System for Multi-modal Child Interaction with Multiple Robots,
    In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Brisbane, Australia, May 2018.
    

12. A. Tsiami, P. P. Filntisis, N. Efthymiou, P. Koutras, G. Potamianos, and P. Maragos,
    Far-Field Audio-Visual Scene Perception Of Multi-Party Human-Robot Interaction for Children and Adults,
    In Proc. IEEE IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Calgary, Canada, Apr. 2018.
    

13. A. Zlatintsi, I. Rodomagoulakis, P. Koutras, A. C. Dometios, V. Pitsikalis, C. S. Tzafestas, and P. Maragos,
    Multimodal Signal Processing and Learning Aspects of Human-Robot Interaction for an Assistive Bathing Robot,
    In Proc. IEEE IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Calgary, Canada, Apr. 2018.
    

14. A. Zlatintsi, I. Rodomagoulakis, V. Pitsikalis, P. Koutras, N. Kardaris, X. S. Papageorgiou, C. S. Tzafestas, P. Maragos,
    Social human-robot interaction for the elderly: two real-life use cases,
    In Proc. ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Companion)(HRI), Vienna, Austria, March 2017.
    

15. G. Panagiotaropoulou, P. Koutras, A. Katsamanis, P. Maragos, A. Zlatintsi, A. Protopapas, E. Karavasilis and N. Smyrnis,
    FMRI-Based Perceptual Validation of A Computational Model for Visual and Auditory Saliency in Videos,
    In Proc. IEEE IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Phoenix, AZ, USA, Sept. 2016.
    

16. P. Koutras, A. Zlatintsi, E.Iosif, A. Katsamanis, P. Maragos and A. Potamianos,
    Predicting Audio-Visual Salient Events Based on Visual, Audio and Text Modalities for Movie Summarization,
    In Proc. IEEE IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Quebec, Canada, Sep. 2015.
    

17. P. Koutras and P. Maragos,
    Estimation of Eye Gaze Direction Angles Based on Active Appearance Models,
    In Proc. IEEE IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Quebec, Canada, Sep. 2015.
    

18. A. Zlatintsi, P. Koutras, N. Efthymiou, P. Maragos, A. Potamianos and K. Pastra,
    Quality Evaluation of Computational Models for Movie Summatization,
    In Proc. 7th Int'l. Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), Costa Navarino, Messinia, Greece, May 2015.
    

19. P. Maragos and P. Koutras,
    Max-Product Dynamical Systems and Applications to Audio-Visual Salient Event Detection in Videos,
    In Proc. IEEE International Conference Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Brisbane, Australia, April 2015.
    

20. K. Maninis, P. Koutras and P. Maragos,
    Advances on Action Recognition in videos using an Interest Point Detector based on Multiband Spatio-Temporal Energies,
    In Proc. IEEE IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), France, Oct. 2014.
    

21. P. Koutras, A. Katsamanis and P. Maragos,
    Predicting Eyes' Fixations in Movie Videos: Visual Saliency Experiments on a New Eye-Tracking Database,
    In Proc. Human Computer Interaction Conference (Eng. Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics) (HCI), Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 2014.
    

Tutorial Presentations

1. P. Maragos and P. Koutras,,
   Multisensory Video Processing and Learning for Human-Robot Interaction,
   Tutorial presented at IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Taipei, Taiwan, Sept., 2019.
   

2. P. Maragos, A. Potamianos, A. Zlatintsi and P. Koutras,
   Multimodal Signal Processing, Saliency and Summarization,
   Tutorial presented at IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), New Orleans, LA, USA, March, 2017.
   

Demo Presentations

1. P. Koutras, G. Chalvatzaki, A. Tsiami, A. Nikolakakis, C. S. Tzafestas and P. Maragos,
   Video Processing and Learning in Assistive Robotic Applications,
   In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Taipei, Taiwan, Sept., 2019.
   

2. N. Gkanatsios, V. Pitsikalis, P. Koutras, A. Zlatintsi and P. Maragos,
   Showcasing Deeply Supervised Multimodal Attentional Translation Embeddings: a Demo for Visual Relationship Detection,
   In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Taipei, Taiwan, Sept., 2019.
   

Diploma Thesis

• P. Koutras,
  Eye Gaze Estimation with Active Appearance Models
  School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece