Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)

Navigating the World's Photographs

Steven Seitz
Department of Computer Science
University of Washington

May 7, 2007, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

There's a big difference between looking at a photograph of a place and being there. But what if you had access to every photo ever captured of that place and could conjure up any view at will? With billions of photographs currently available online, the Internet is beginning to resemble such a database, capturing most of the world's significant sites from a huge number of vantage points and viewing conditions. For example, a Google image search for "notre dame" or "grand canyon" each returns more than half a million photos, showing the sites from myriad viewpoints, different times of day and night, and changes in season, weather and decade. This talk explores ways of transforming this massive, unorganized photo collection into visualizations of the world's sites, cities, and landscapes. After a brief recap of our work on Photo Tourism and Photosynth, I will focus on current efforts and newest results, in the domains of 3D scene reconstruction and new visual interfaces for navigating photo collections.

About the Speaker

Steven Seitz is Short-Dooley Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He received his B.A. in computer science and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and his Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1997. Following his doctoral work, he spent one year visiting the Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research, and subsequently two years as an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in July 2000. He was twice awarded the David Marr Prize for the best paper at the International Conference of Computer Vision, and has received an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. Professor Seitz is interested in problems in computer vision and computer graphics. His current research focuses on capturing the structure, appearance, and behavior of the real world from digital imagery.

Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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