Fraunhofer ICT Group

Pablo Wilke Berenguer, research associate at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI, completed his dissertation on "Physical Layer Reliability Aspects in Industrial Optical Wireless Communication" at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) with the final mark summa cum laude, in June 2019.

Criminals have been finding weaknesses in biometric photos for some time now. “Face morphing”, as it is called, plays not least into the hands of human smugglers. Fraunhofer IGD technology is helping uncover forged documents and make IDs more forgery-proof.

Fraunhofer MEVIS provides the software MEVIS draw for creating and editing segmentations on 3D medical images for free download. MEVIS draw supports clinicians and AI researchers in interactively annotating data such as CT or MR images.

MEVIS draw offers intuitive brush and freehand interactions for drawing and modifying contours. An interpolation automatically fills in contours and updates them after each interaction, thus making 3D segmentation very efficient. Import of images and segmentations created with other software as well as export of results are supported in various formats, such as DICOM (including SEG and RTSTRUCT), MetaImage, MLImage, NiFTI, and NRRD. MEVIS draw is available for Windows and Linux. A macOS version is planned for 2020.

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is an industry association for the development of Open Solutions, in which all well-known players of the worldwide telecommunications industry are represented. The aim is to give everyone in the world access to the Internet. Fraunhofer FIT's "Wireless Backhaul" (WiBACK) radio relay technology will be a key component of TIP’s OpenCellular project for bringing the Internet to remote, sparsely populated regions.

The development and introduction of machines ranging from highly automated to driverless will have a strong impact on global agriculture. This inevitably raises the question of how fast and to what extent the new technologies will determine the market in the future.

At the end of October, the Bundesnetzagentur published the fees for frequencies in the range from 3.7 GHz to 3.8 GHz for local applications, thus laying the foundation for campus networks, i.e. a company's own network on factory premises. Fraunhofer FOKUS discussed the technical implementation of such private networks with partners from industry and science at the Industrial IoT (IIoT) Forum and the FOKUS FUSECO Forum (FFF) from November 6-8, 2019, and presented various 5G demonstrations for the factory of the future.

Prof. Joachim Bös was named the new Executive Director of the Fraunhofer IDMT in Ilmenau, Germany, on October 1, 2019, taking over from Prof. Udo Bechtloff, who had served as the institute’s acting director since February 2018 and will be leaving on October 31, 2019. In addition to managing the institute, Joachim Bös will also be in charge of setting up the research group “Industrial Applications of Media Technologies” at the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Technische Universität Ilmenau in Ilmenau, Germany, as a newly appointed professor. He previously worked at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Darmstadt, Germany, as Academic Director and deputy head of the research group System Reliability, Adaptive Structures, and Machine Acoustics SAM.