Melani Sánchez García

I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Bionic Vision Lab, Department of Computer Science at UCSB. , where I am advised by Michael Beyeler .

Prior to joining UCSB, I received a PhD in Computer Science and Systems Engineering from Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, as well as a BS in Chemical Engineering and a MS in Chemical Engineering from Universidad de Valencia, Spain.

My main research interests lie in Computer Vision and Deep Learning. I'm particularly excited about conducting research in simulated prosthetic vision (SPV) and building immersive virtual reality (VR) systems of SPV that combine computational modeling of the brain with different computer vision algorithms.

Email: mesangar@ucsb.edu

[GitHub] | [LinkedIn] | [CV]

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News:
  • I have released a Virtual-Reality software for replicating and extending the experimentation with prosthetic vision. link here!
  • I was featured in Ágora, which is the Aragón Radio program dedicated to popular science. (from minute 5)
  • I have created an image Dataset of phosphene images for Simulated Prosthetic Vision. link here!
  • Our paper "Indoor Scenes Understanding for Visual Prosthesis with Fully Convolutional Networks" was accepted for publication at VISAPP 2019.
  • I participated at the BMVA Computer Vision Summer School 2018 in Norwich, UK!
Research

Towards a Smart Bionic Eye: AI-powered artificial vision for the treatment of incurable blindness
Michael Beyeler, Melani Sanchez-Garcia
OSF Preprints

Efficient visual object representation using a biologically plausible spike-latency code and winner-take-all inhibition system
Melani Sanchez-Garcia*, Tushar Chauhan, Benoit R. Cottereau, Michael Beyeler
NeuroVision Workshop, IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) ‘22
poster  ·  arXiv

Assessing visual acuity in visual prostheses through a virtual-reality system
Melani Sanchez-Garcia*, Roberto Morollon-Ruiz*, Ruben Martinez-Cantin, José J. Guerrero, Eduardo Fernandez-Jover
arXiv

Augmented reality navigation system for visual prosthesis
Melani Sanchez-Garcia*, Alejandro Perez-Yus, Ruben Martinez-Cantin, José J. Guerrero
Submitted: September 14, 2021
Journal of Neural Engineering

Influence of field of view in visual prostheses design: Analysis with a VR system
Melani Sanchez-Garcia*, Ruben Martinez-Cantin, Jesús Bermudez-Cameo
, José J. Guerrero
Published: October 7, 2020
Journal of Neural Engineering
paper  ·  Virtual-Reality software

Semantic and structural image segmentation for prosthetic vision
Melani Sanchez-Garcia*, Ruben Martinez-Cantin, José J. Guerrero
Published: January 29, 2020
PLOS One Journal
paper  ·  Phosphene image Dataset

Indoor Scenes Understanding for Visual Prosthesis with Fully Convolutional Networks
Melani Sanchez-Garcia*, Ruben Martinez-Cantin, José J. Guerrero
14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications, VISAPP 2019
paper  ·  poster

Structural and object detection for phosphene images
Melani Sanchez-Garcia*, Ruben Martinez-Cantin, José J. Guerrero
Also presented at Women in Computer Vision Workshop, ECCV 2018
poster  ·  arXiv

Other Activities
  1. I was in the BMVA Computer Vision Summer School 2018
  2. I participated in the initiative 'Una ingeniera en cada cole' (AMIT)
  3. Poster presentation. VIII Jornada de Jóvenes Investigadores del I3A