- Date: July 13, 2015 - July 17, 2015
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - SA group members (M. Liu, S. Lin (intern), S. Ramalingam, O. Tuzel) presented a paper at the Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Rome July 13-17 called 'Layered Interpretation of Street View Images'. The results they reported are now listed as the leader of the benchmark competition sponsored by Daimler. [Note that at that URL ref 2 is from collaboration with Daimler and it uses a FPGA for high speed, whereas MERL result is obtained with desktop computer and GPU.].
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- Date: July 11, 2014
Where: R&D Magazine
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - A team with members from MERL, ATC, and Meiden received an R&D 100 award for its work on Mitsubishi Electric's MELFA-3D Vision system for industrial robot arms. This system completely automates bin picking a task for picking up parts that are randomly placed in a bin and aligning their poses for assembly processes.
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- Date: June 23, 2013
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Single Image Calibration of Multi-Axial Imaging Systems" by Agrawal, A. and Ramalingam, S., "Joint Geodesic Upsampling of Depth Images" by Liu, M-Y, Tuzel, O. and Taguchi, Y. and "Manhattan Junction Catalogue for Spatial Reasoning of Indoor Scenes" by Ramalingam, S., Pillai, J.K., Jain, A. and Taguchi, Y. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, May 23, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Raquel Urtasun, TTI-Chicago
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract 
The development of autonomous systems that can effectively assist people with everyday tasks is one of the grand challenges in modern computer science. Notable examples are personal robotics for the elderly and people with disabilities, as well as autonomous driving systems which can help decrease fatalities caused by traffic accidents. To achieve full autonomy, multiple perception tasks must be solved: Autonomous systems should sense the environment, recognize the 3D world and interact with it. While most approaches have tackled individual perceptual components in isolation, I believe that the next generation of perceptual systems should reason jointly about multiple tasks.
In this talk I'll argue that there are four key aspects towards developing such holistic models: (i) learning, (ii) inference (iii) representation, and (iv) data. I'll describe efficient Markov random field learning and inference algorithms that exploit both the structure of the problem as well as parallel computation to achieve computational and memory efficiency. I'll demonstrate the effectiveness of our models on a wide variety of examples, and show representations and inference strategies that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art performance and result in several orders of magnitude speed-ups in a variety of challenging tasks, including 3D reconstruction, 3D layout parsing, object detection, semantic segmentation and free text exploitation for holistic visual recognition.
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- Date: May 14, 2013
Where: IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Point-Plane SLAM for Hand-Held 3D Sensors" by Taguchi, Y., Jian, Y-D, Ramalingam, S. and Feng, C. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA).
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- Date: November 5, 2012
Where: International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "SLAM Using Both Points and Planes for Hand-Held 3D Sensors" by Taguchi, Y., Jian, Y.-D., Ramalingam, S. and Feng, C. was presented at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
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- Date: October 7, 2012
Where: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Motion-Aware Structured Light Using Spatio-Temporal Decodable Patterns" by Taguchi, Y., Agrawal, A. and Tuzel, O., "Rainbow Flash Camera: Depth Edge Extraction Using Complementary Colors" by Taguchi, Y. and "Monocular Visual Odometry and Dense 3D Reconstruction for On-Road Vehicles" by Zhu, M., Ramalingam, S., Taguchi, Y. and Garaas, T. were presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV).
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- Date: September 27, 2012
Where: International Journal of Computer Vision
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "A Theory of Minimal 3D Point to 3D Plane Registration and Its Generalization" by Ramalingam, S. and Taguchi, Y. was published in International Journal of Computer Vision.
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- Date & Time: Friday, June 29, 2012; 2:30 PM
Speaker: Prof. Marc Pollefeys, ETH Zurich and UNC Chapel Hill
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - One of the fundamental problems of computer vision is to extract 3D shape and motion from images. This can be achieved when a scene or object is observed from different viewpoints or over a period of time. First, we will discuss image-based 3D modeling and localization in large environments, e.g. urban 3D reconstruction from vehicle-borne cameras and (geo)localization from mobile-phone images. In this context, we will discuss some of the challenges an opportunities offered by symmetries of architectural structures. We will also discuss how changes in an urban environment can be detected from images, leading to the possibility to efficiently acquire 4D models. In addition to explicit 4D modeling of an event, we'll consider the possibility to perform interactive video-based rendering from casually captured videos.
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- Date: June 16, 2012
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Connecting the Dots in Multi-Class Classification: From Nearest Subspace to Collaborative Representation" by Chi, Y. and Porikli, F., "Decomposing Global Light Transport using Time of Flight Imaging" by Wu, D., O'Toole, M., Velten, A., Agrawal, A. and Raskar, R., "Changedetection.net: A New Change Detection Benchmark Dataset" by Goyette, N., Jodoin, P.-M., Porikli, F., Konrad, J. and Ishwar, P. and "A Theory of Multi-Layer Flat Refractive Geometry" by Agrawal, A., Ramalingam, S., Taguchi, Y. and Chari, V. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: May 14, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Voting-based Pose Estimation for Robotic Assembly Using a 3D Sensor" by Choi, C., Taguchi, Y., Tuzel, O., Liu, M.-Y. and Ramalingam, S., "Convex Bricks: A New Primitive for Visual Hull Modeling and Reconstruction" by Chari, V., Agrawal, A., Taguchi, Y. and Ramalingam, S. and "Coverage Optimized Active Learning for k - NN Classifiers" by Joshi, A.J., Porikli, F. and Papanikolopoulos, N. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, April 12, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Stefanie Jegelka, UC Berkeley
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - Graph cuts that represent pairwise Markov random fields have been a popular tool in computer vision, but they have some well-known shortcomings that arise from their locality and conditional independence assumptions. We therefore extend graph cuts to "cooperative cuts", where "cooperating" graph edges incur a lower combined cost. This cooperation is modeled by submodular functions on edges. The resulting family of global energy functions includes recent models in computer vision and also new critieria which e.g. significantly improve image segmentation results for finely structured objects and for images with variation in contrast. While "minimum cooperative cut" is NP-hard, the underlying indirect submodularity and the graph structure enable efficient approximations.
In the second part of the talk, I will switch topics and briefly address Hilbert space embeddings of distributions. With the kernel trick, such embeddings help generalize clustering objectives to consider higher-order moments of distributions instead of merely point locations.
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- Date: June 21, 2011
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Entropy Rate Superpixel Segmentation" by Liu, M.-Y., Tuzel, O., Ramalingam, S. and Chellappa, R., "Structured Light 3D Scanning in the Presence of Global Illumination" by Gupta, M., Agrawal, A., Veeraraghavan, A. and Narasimhan, S., "CrossTrack: Robust 3D Tracking from Two Cross-Sectional Views" by Hussein, M., Porikli, F., Li, R. and Arsian, S., "P2C2: Programmable Pixel Compressive Camera for High Speed Imaging" by Reddy, D., Veeraraghavan, A. and Chellappa, R., "Beyond Alhazen's Problem: Analytical Projection Model for Non-Central Catadioptric Cameras with Quadric Mirrors" by Agrawal, A., Taguchi, Y. and Ramalingam, S. and "The Light-Path Less Traveled" by Ramalingam, S., Bouaziz, S., Sturm, P. and Torr, P. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: May 9, 2011
Where: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Pose Estimation using Both Points and Lines for Geo-Localization" by Ramalingam, S., Bouaziz, S. and Sturm, P. and "Finding a Needle in a Specular Haystack" by Shroff, N., Taguchi, Y., Tuzel, O., Veeraraghavan, A., Ramalingam, S. and Okuda, H. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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- Date: January 15, 2011
Where: Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "Camera Models and Fundamental Concepts Used in Geometric Computer Vision" by Sturm, P., Ramalingam, S., Tardif, J.-P., Gasparini, S. and Barreto, J. was published in Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision.
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- Date: December 15, 2010
Where: ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "Axial-Cones: Modeling Spherical Catadioptric Cameras for Wide-Angle Light Field Rendering:" by Taguchi, Y., Agrawal, A., Veeraraghavan, A., Ramalingam, S. and Raskar, R. was published in ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).
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- Date: October 18, 2010
Where: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
MERL Contact: Matthew Brand Brief - The paper "SKYLINE2GPS: Localization in Urban Canyons Using Omni-skylines" by Ramalingam, S., Bouaziz, S., Sturm, P. and Brand, M. was presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
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- Date: September 5, 2010
Where: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Image Invariants for Smooth Reflective Surfaces" by Sankaranarayanan, A.C., Veeraraghavan, A., Tuzel, O. and Agrawal, A., "Analytical Forward Projection for Axial Non-Central Dioptric & Catadioptric Cameras" by Agrawal, A., Taguchi, Y. and Ramalingam, S., "P2Pi: A Minimal Solution for Registration of 3D Points to 3D Planes" by Ramalingam, S., Taguchi, Y., Marks, T.K. and Tuzel, O., "Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Methods for Non-Euclidean Manifolds with Applications to Human Activity Analysis in Videos" by Chaudhry, R. and Ivanov, Y. and "Flexible Voxels for Motion-Aware Videography" by Gupta, M., Agrawal, A., Veeraraghavan, A. and Narasimhan, S.G. were presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV).
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- Date: June 13, 2010
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
MERL Contacts: Michael J. Jones; Tim K. Marks Brief - The papers "Optimal Coded Sampling for Temporal Super-Resolution" by Agrawal, A.K., Gupta, M., Veeraraghavan, A.N. and Narasimhan, S.G., "Breaking the Interactive Bottleneck in Multi-class Classification with Active Selection and Binary Feedback" by Joshi, A.J., Porikli, F.M. and Papanikolopoulos, N., "Axial Light Field for Curved Mirrors: Reflect Your Perspective, Widen Your View" by Taguchi, Y., Agrawal, A.K., Ramalingam, S. and Veeraraghavan, A.N., "Morphable Reflectance Fields for Enhancing Face Recognition" by Kumar, R., Jones, M.J. and Marks, T.K., "Increasing Depth Resolution of Electron Microscopy of Neural Circuits using Sparse Tomographic Reconstruction" by Veeraraghavan, A., Genkin, A.V., Vitaladevuni, S., Scheffer, L., Xu, S., Hess, H., Fetter, R., Cantoni, M., Knott, G. and Chklovskii, D., "Specular Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Reflection Correspondences" by Sankaranarayanan, A., Veeraraghavan, A.N., Tuzel, C.O. and Agrawal, A.K., "Fast Directional Chamfer Matching" by Liu, M.-Y., Tuzel, C.O., Veeraraghavan, A.N. and Chellappa, R. and "Robust RVM regression using sparse outlier model" by Mitra, K., Veeraraghavan, A. and Chellappa, R. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: February 1, 2010
Where: Computer Vision and Image Understanding
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "Generic Self-Calibration of Central Cameras" by Ramalingam, S., Sturm, P. and Lodha, S.K. was published in Computer Vision and Image Understanding.
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- Date: September 27, 2009
Where: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCV)
MERL Contact: Matthew Brand Brief - The paper "Geolocalization using Skylines from Omni-Images" by Ramalingam, S., Bouaziz, S., Sturm, P. and Brand, M.E. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCV).
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