Title:	Visual Chatter in the Real World
Date:	May 22, 2007 (Tuesday)
Time:	2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Venue:	Room 1027, 10/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:	Professor Shree K. Nayar T. C. Chang Professor of Computer Science Columbia University New York USA

ABSTRACT:

When a scene is lit by a source of light, the brightness of each point in the scene can be viewed as having two components, namely, direct and global. The direct component is due to the direct illumination of the point by the source. The global component is due to the illumination of the point by other points in the scene. The global component can arise from various effects, including, interreflections, subsurface scattering and volumetric scattering.

In this talk, I will present a fast method for separating the direct and global components of a scene measured by a camera and illuminated by a light source. This separation method has been applied to a wide variety of real-world objects. The resulting direct and global images reveal surprising interactions of light within as well as between objects. I will show results for living objects (skin, leaves, flowers, etc.) as well as inanimate ones (marble, clay, cloth, etc.).

BIOGRAPHY:

Shree K. Nayar received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 1990. He is currently the T. C. Chang Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He co-directs the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center. He also heads the Columbia Computer Vision Laboratory (CAVE), which is dedicated to the development of advanced computer vision systems. His research is focused on three areas; the creation of novel cameras, the design of physics based models for vision, and the development of algorithms for scene understanding. His work is motivated by applications in the fields of digital imaging, computer graphics, and robotics.

He has received best paper awards at ICCV 1990, ICPR 1994, CVPR 1994, ICCV 1995, CVPR 2000 and CVPR 2004. He is the recipient of the David Marr Prize (1990 and 1995), the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (1992), the National Young Investigator Award (1993), the NTT Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award (1994), the Keck Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching (1995) and the Columbia Great Teacher Award (2006). He has published over 100 scientific papers and has been awarded several patents for inventions related to vision and robotics.

Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444

For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar