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


Visual 3D modeling of real-world objects, scenes and events from videos

Marc Pollefeys
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina

April 30, 2007, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

Images and videos form a rich source of information about the visual world. The extraction of 3D information from images is an important research problem in computer vision and graphics. The ubiquitous presence of cameras and the tremendous advances of processing and communication technologies yields important opportunities and challenges in those areas. My work has focused on developing flexible techniques for recovering 3D shape, motion and appearance from images. A first example of this is an approach to recover photo-realistic 3D models of objects or scenes from videos. A key aspect of our approach is the ability to also recover the geometric and photometric calibration of the camera from the image data so that our techniques can also work with uncalibrated consumer cameras or archive photographs. Our recent work in this area has focussed on real-time reconstruction of urban environments from video streams. Besides static scenes, we also aim to model dynamic events. While it can be possible to recover dynamic shape from a single video stream, the simplest way to recover dynamic shapes consists of using multiple cameras. Here also the complete calibration and synchronization can be obtained from video recorded during normal operation. I will present a shape reconstruction approaches that recovers the 3D shape of dynamic objects as well as static occluding objects in the environment. Towards the future, one of my main research goals is to develop approaches for capturing immersive 4D spatio-temporal representation of dynamic events taking place in large-scale environments.

About the Speaker

Marc Pollefeys is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will start as a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in August. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, where he also received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1994 and 1999, respectively. Dr. Pollefeys joined the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill in July 2002. One of his main research goals is to develop flexible approaches to capture visual representations of real world objects, scenes and events. Dr. Pollefeys has received several prizes for his research, including a Marr prize, an NSF CAREER award and a Packard Fellowship. He has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed publications. He was the co-general chair of the 3rd International Symposium on 3D Data Processing Visualization and Transmission and is on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the International Journal of Computer Vision.


Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

Back to the Colloquium Page