Event

Minsky Memorial Lecture on Imaging Science

MIT Media Lab

Honoring Marvin Minsky’s Contributions to Imaging Science

Talks: 3:00-4:30pm
Opening remarks: Nicholas Negroponte
Reception to follow

William Freeman, PhD | Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was the associate department head from 2011-2014. His current research interests include machine learning applied to computer vision, Bayesian models of visual perception, and computational photography. He received outstanding paper awards at computer vision or machine learning conferences in 1997, 2006, 2009 and 2012, and test-of-time awards for papers from 1990 and 1995. Previous research topics include steerable filters and pyramids, orientation histograms, the generic viewpoint assumption, color constancy, computer vision for computer games, and belief propagation in networks with loops.

Accidental Cameras: Using Apertures and Occluders in the Scene to Form Images
We study cameras that are accidentally formed in scenes. Accidental pinhole camera images are often mistaken for shadows, but can reveal structures outside a room, or the unseen shape of the light aperture into the room. “Inverse” pinhole camera images are formed by subtracting an image with a small occluder present from a reference image without the occluder. Corner cameras, formed by a vertical edge and a ground plane, yield 1-D views around a corner and form a third category of accidental camera. We show examples of all these cameras in natural settings, revealing details about a scene outside the image

Gordon Wetzstein, PhD | Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Gordon Wetzstein is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and, by courtesy, of computer science at Stanford University. He is the leader of the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab, an interdisciplinary research group focused on advancing imaging, microscopy, and display systems. At the intersection of computer graphics, machine vision, optics, scientific computing, and perception, Wetzstein’s research has a wide range of applications in next-generation consumer electronics, scientific imaging, human-computer interaction, remote sensing, and many other areas. Prior to joining Stanford in 2014, Wetzstein was a research scientist in the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 2011 and graduated with honors from the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany before that.

Computational Near-Eye Displays
Virtual reality is a new medium that provides unprecedented user experiences. Eventually, VR/AR systems will redefine communication, entertainment, education, collaborative work, simulation, training, telesurgery, and basic vision research. In all of these applications, the primary interface between the user and the digital world is the near-eye display. While today’s VR systems struggle to provide natural and comfortable viewing experiences, next-generation computational near-eye displays have the potential to provide visual experiences that are better than the real world. In this talk, we explore the frontiers of VR systems engineering.

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