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


Visual localization and modeling of urban environments

Jana Kosecka
Department of Computer Science
George Mason University

April 23, 2007, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

Recent advances in techniques for capturing large scale models of urban environments, give rise to many novel applications and motivate development of various systems for enhacing navigational capabilities of humans as well as autonomous vehicles. For outdoors environment a prototype system for image-based localization will be described. Given a database of views of city street scenes tagged by GPS locations, the system computes the GPS location of a novel query view. The presented approach is capable of dealing with heavily contaminated and ambiguous data inherent to urban environments, using novel robust estimation techniques capable of dealing with large number of outliers. I will also briefly discuss a set of tools and techniques for 3D modeling of axis aligned building models from a sparse set of views, capable of capturing finer geometric details encoded in line segments. These types models can be used as a front end to alternative rendering styles or more efficient triangulations.

About the Speaker

Jana Kosecka is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, George Mason University. She obtained her M.S.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Slovak Technical University and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1996. In 1996 - 1999 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the EECS Department at University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of David Marr's prize (with Y. Ma, S. Soatto and S. Sastry) and received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Jana is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics and a Member of the Editorial Board of International Journal of Computer Vision. Her general research interests are in Robotics and Computer Vision. In particular she is interested 'seeing' systems engaged in autonomous tasks, acquisition of static and dynamic models of environments by means of visual sensing and human-computer interaction.


Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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