Research Intern

Location: Paris Department: Engineering Employment Type: FullTime Location Type: Remote

Context

Vizzia's cameras stay on the same streets for months and process video in the field, under strict compute and energy constraints. Two research questions come directly from that setup. How do you understand what changed in a scene over hours or days, when classic methods only compare two frames? And how do you use urban video to train models and deliver clips to local authorities, while protecting the people who appear in it without having anything to do with the event?

250+ local authorities already rely on Vizzia to keep their streets clean and safe. Each of these questions affects what our cameras can detect and how we handle the data behind it.

We are opening two end-of-studies research internships in our R&D team, one per question. Same internship, same setup, two subjects. Each is built around a research question, a hypothesis to test, public benchmarks and long real-world Vizzia sequences, and is designed to support your master's thesis. The internship lasts 6 months, with the possibility of continuing as a CIFRE PhD.

What You'll Do

1. Subject A: Modelling the long-term state of an urban scene

Implement pixel-level baselines (background subtraction, learned change detection on image pairs) and low frame rate tracking, and quantify where they fail

Design an object-centric scene memory: detect objects with open-vocabulary detectors (Grounding DINO, OWLv2), segment them (SAM 2), describe them with lighting-robust features (DINOv2) and their presence history, and assign each object a state updated over time: permanent, temporary, new, removed

Target cases from Vizzia's field use: illegal dumping, abandoned luggage, vehicles parked for days, damaged or missing street furniture

Characterise failure modes by observation rate, history length, day/night and weather, object shape and evolution (a pile of waste that grows, a tarp moving in the wind), scene density and occlusions

Evaluate on events rather than frames: precision and recall of appearances and disappearances, detection delay, false alerts per camera per day, on PETS 2006, i-LIDS / AVSS 2007, ABODA, CDnet 2014 and Vizzia sequences

2. Subject B: Anonymising urban video while preserving its utility

Build detect-then-blur baselines (RetinaFace, EgoBlur, Vizzia's in-house plate detector), measure missed detections first (small faces, night, motion blur), then quantify the recall gained by propagating anonymisation through tracking

Compare generative replacement methods: DeepPrivacy2 full-body GAN, diffusion inpainting for faces, full-body diffusion and video regeneration from structural cues (pose, segmentation, depth), plus synthetic plates with known text

Work on temporal consistency (one stable synthetic identity per track, no flicker) and on selective anonymisation for clips delivered to local authorities: everyone except the people involved in the event

Measure protection (residual leaks per 1,000 frames, ArcFace and person re-ID attacks, OCR on anonymised plates) against utility (detection and tracking performance of models trained on raw vs anonymised video, event readability for an operator), within the frame of GDPR and the CNIL's 2022 position on augmented cameras

Evaluate on MOT17, MOT20, Cityscapes, BDD100K and Vizzia sequences

3. Common to both subjects

Start with a literature review, then build test sets from public benchmarks and long Vizzia sequences, part of which you will annotate during the internship

Define the evaluation protocol and metrics before running the main experiments

Deliver a model or pipeline evaluated on public and Vizzia data, a documented benchmark, clean code, integration recommendations and your master's thesis

Who You Are

Final-year student in an M2 or engineering school, specialised in computer vision, machine learning or applied mathematics

Fluent in Python and PyTorch, and comfortable processing video streams

For Subject A: knowledge of object detection, multi-object tracking or visual representation learning. For Subject B: knowledge of generative models (GAN, diffusion, inpainting), detection, tracking or re-identification, and an interest in personal data protection

Technical English good enough to read and synthesize research papers

Rigorous with experiments and able to move a research question forward on your own

At Vizzia, we care about precision, ownership and getting things done. We're looking for people who are genuinely interested in what public-sector work involves.

Compensation & Benefits

🏡 Hybrid work

🏝 Mandatory internship agreement from your school (1 day off per month)

💻 MacBook ou PC

🍜 60% coverage of meal vouchers worth €9 per day worked

🚃 50% Navigo pass reimbursement

💼 Offices located in central Paris (9th arrondissement)

☀️ Annual offsite with the whole team and plenty of company events

If you've read this far, you're probably very interested in the role and/or Vizzia. We'd like to hear from you even if you feel you don't check every box.