Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
On Seeing Stuff: The Perception of Materials by Humans and Machines
Edward H. Adelson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Monday, October 7, 2002, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract
The perception of objects is a well-developed field, but the perception of
materials (the stuff of which objects are made) has been studied rather
little. This is surprising given how important materials are for humans, and
how important they must be for useful robots. Consider a domestic robot
that encounters a white object on a countertop. It might be a pile of sugar,
a crumpled napkin, or a dollop of cream cheese; each material must be
recognized so that it can be properly handled. In studying material
perception, we can take ideas from various areas in vision research,
including lightness and texture perception. We can also learn from computer
graphics, where the realistic rendering of materials is an important
research topic. I will describe recent psychophysical and computational
results that indicate some of the mechanisms that are used humans and could
be used by machines.
About the Speaker
Edward H. Adelson is a Professor of Vision Science in the Department
of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He has a B.A. in Physics and Philosophy from Yale
University, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University
of Michigan. His research is in the areas of human perception, machine
vision, and image processing.
Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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