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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2006
January 27, 12:00 p.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium
David
Forsyth
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Looking at people"
Abstract: An important, open vision problem is to describe what people are doing in a sequence of video. This problem is difficult for several reasons. First, one must determine the configuration of each person's body; but it is hard to track people accurately, because many parts of the body are small and fast-moving. Second, one must determine motion paths from the tracks; this is tricky, because one must sew together tracker reports into a motion path that could, indeed, be human. Finally, one must describe what the person is doing; this problem is poorly understood, not least because there is no natural or canonical set of categories into which to classify activities. In this talk, I will describe progress on this problem obtained by marrying a tracker and a motion synthesis system. The tracker obtains measurements of body configuration from the image; the motion synthesis system takes those measurements and generates motions that are (a) clearly human and (b) close to the image measurements. Since the synthesis system uses labelled frames, we also obtain a labelling of each image frame. This talk describes joint work with Deva Ramanan, Okan Arikan and Leslie Ikemoto.
Biography: David Forsyth holds a BSc and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and an MA and D.Phil from Oxford University. He is currently a full professor at U.C. Berkeley and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published over 100 papers on computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning. He served as program co-chair for IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2000, general co-chair for IEEE CVPR 2006, and is a regular member of the program committee of all major international conferences on computer vision. He served on the NRC Committee on "Protecting Kids from Pornography and other Inappropriate Material on the Internet", which sat for three years and produced a study widely praised for its sensible content. He has received best paper awards at the International Conference on Computer Vision and at the European Conference on Computer Vision.
His recent textbook, "Computer Vision: A Modern
Approach" (joint with J. Ponce and published by Prentice Hall) is
now widely adopted as a course text (adoptions include MIT, U. Wisconsin-Madison,
UIUC, Georgia Tech and U.C. Berkeley).
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