- Date: December 14, 2015 - December 16, 2015
Where: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher, Oncel Tuzel, gave a keynote talk at 2016 International Symposium on Visual Computing in Las Vegas, Dec. 16, 2015. The talk was titled: "Machine vision for robotic bin-picking: Sensors and algorithms" and reviewed MERL's research in the application of 2D and 3D sensing and machine learning to the problem of general pose estimation.
The talk abstract was: For over four years, at MERL, we have worked on the robot "bin-picking" problem: using a 2D or 3D camera to look into a bin of parts and determine the pose, 3D rotation and translation, of a good candidate to pick up. We have solved the problem several different ways with several different sensors. I will briefly describe the sensors and the algorithms. In the first half of the talk, I will describe the Multi-Flash camera, a 2D camera with 8 flashes, and explain how this inexpensive camera design is used to extract robust geometric features, depth edges and specular edges, from the parts in a cluttered bin. I will present two pose estimation algorithms, (1) Fast directional chamfer matching--a sub-linear time line matching algorithm and (2) specular line reconstruction, for fast and robust pose estimation of parts with different surface characteristics. In the second half of the talk, I will present a voting-based pose estimation algorithm applicable to 3D sensors. We represent three-dimensional objects using a set of oriented point pair features: surface points with normals and boundary points with directions. I will describe a max-margin learning framework to identify discriminative features on the surface of the objects. The algorithm selects and ranks features according to their importance for the specified task which leads to improved accuracy and reduced computational cost.
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- 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 & Time: Friday, October 4, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Goksel Dedeoglu, Texas Instruments
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - There are growing needs to accelerate computer vision algorithms on embedded processors for wide-ranging equipment including mobile phones, network cameras, robots, and automotive safety systems. In our Vision R&D group, we conduct various projects to understand how the vision requirements can be best addressed on Digital Signal Processors (DSP), where the compute bottlenecks are, and how we should evolve our hardware & software architectures to meet our customers' future needs. Towards this end, we build prototypes wherein we design and optimize embedded software for real-world application performance and robustness. In this talk, I will provide examples of vision problems that we have recently tackled.
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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: 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: 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: May 8, 2012
Where: The International Journal of Robotics Research
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "Fast Object Localization and Pose Estimation in Heavy Clutter for Robotic Bin Picking" by Liu, M.-Y., Tuzel, O., Veeraraghavan, A., Taguchi, Y., Marks, T.K. and Chellappa, R. was published in The International Journal of Robotics Research.
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- Date: April 1, 2012
Where: Computational Photography (ICCP), 2012 IEEE International Conference on
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Variable Focus Video: Reconstructing Depth and Video for Dynamic Scenes" by Shroff, N., Veeraraghavan, A., Taguchi, Y., Tuzel, O., Agrawal, A. and Chellappa, R. was presented at the Computational Photography (ICCP), 2012 IEEE International Conference on.
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- Date: July 14, 2011
Where: Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Compressed Inference for Probabilistic Sequential Models" by Polatkan, G. and Tuzel, O. was presented at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).
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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: 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: May 3, 2010
Where: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Pose Estimation in Heavy Clutter Using a Multi-Flash Camera" by Liu, M.-Y., Tuzel, C.O., Veeraraghavan, A.N., Chellappa, R., Agrawal, A.K. and Okuda, H., "Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filtering for Probing-based 6-DOF Localization in Robotic Assembly" by Taguchi, Y., Marks, T.K. and Okuda, H. and "Multi-Class Batch-mode Active Learning for Image Classification" 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: September 29, 2009
Where: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - The paper "Kernel Methods for Weakly Supervised Mean Shift Clustering" by Tuzel, C.O., Porikli, F.M. and Meer, P. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).
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- Date: October 15, 2008
Where: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - The article "Pedestrian Detection via Classification on Riemannian Manifolds" by Tuzel, O., Porikli, F. and Meer, P. was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
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- Date: June 28, 2008
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
MERL Contacts: Matthew Brand; Anthony Vetro Brief - The papers "Non-Refractive Modulators for Encoding and Capturing Scene Appearance and Depth" by Veeraraghavan, A., Agrawal, A., Raskar, R., Mohan, A. and Tumblin, J., "Feature Transformation of Biometric Templates for Secure Biometric Systems based on Error Correcting Codes" by Sutcu, Y., Rane, S., Yedidia, J.S., Draper, S.C. and Vetro, A., "Constant Time O(1) Bilateral Filtering" by Porikli, F., "Learning on Lie Groups for Invariant Detection and Tracking" by Tuzel, O., Porikli, F. and Meer, P., "Kernel Integral Images: A Framework for Fast non-Uniform Filtering" by Hussein, M., Porikli, F. and Davis, L., "A Conditional Random Field for Automatic Photo Editing" by Brand, M. and Pletscher, P., "Boosting Adaptive Linear Weak Classifiers for Online Learning and Tracking" by Parag, T., Porikli, F. and Elgammai, A. and "Sensing Increased Image Resolution Using Aperture Masks" by Mohan, A., Huang, X., Tumblin, J. and Raskar, R. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: June 17, 2007
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Resolving Objects at Higher Resolution from a Single Motion-blurred Image" by Agrawal, A. and Raskar, R., "Human Detection via Classification on Riemannian Manifolds" by Tuzel, O., Porikli, F. and Meer, P. and "Statistics of Infrared Images" by Morris, N., Avidan, S., Matusik, W. and Pfister, H. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: January 1, 2007
Awarded to: Oncel Tuzel, Fatih Porikli and Peter Meer
Awarded for: "Human Detection via Classification of Riemannian Manifolds"
Awarded by: IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Machine Learning
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- Date: October 8, 2006
Where: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun Brief - The papers "Extensions of H.264/AVC for Multiview Video Compression" by Martinian, E., Behrens, A., Xin, J., Vetro, A. and Sun, H., "Fast Construction of Covariance Matrices for Arbitrary Size Image Windows" by Porikli, F. and Tuzel, O. and "A Cascading Framework of Contour Motion and Deformation Estimation for Non-Rigid Object Tracking" by Shao, J., Porikli, F. and Chellappa, R. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
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- Date: June 17, 2006
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Covariance Tracking using Model Update Based on Lie Algebra" by Porikli, F., Tuzel, O. and Meer, P., "Covariance Tracker" by Porikli, F. and Tuzel, O. and "Edge Suppression by Gradient Field Transformation using Cross-Projection Tensors" by Agrawal, A., Raskar, R. and Chellappa, R. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: May 7, 2006
Where: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Region Covariance: A Fast Descriptor for Detection and Classification" by Tuzel, O., Porikli, F. and Meer, P. and "What is the Range of Surface Reconstructions from a Gradient Field?" by Agrawal, A., Raskar, R. and Chellappa, R. were presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV).
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- Date: November 6, 2005
Where: ACM International Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks (VSSN)
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - The paper "Bayesian Background Modeling for Foreground Detection" by Porikli, F. and Tuzel, O. was presented at the ACM International Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks (VSSN).
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- Date: July 6, 2005
Where: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Highlights Extraction from Sports Video Based on an Audio-Visual Marker Detection Framework" by Xiong, Z., Radhakrishnan, R., Divakaran, A. and Husang, T.S. and "Multi-Kernel Object Tracking" by Porikli, F. and Tuzel, O. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME).
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