Jay Thornton

MERL Research / Technical Staff
Group Manager, Imaging
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1982

Phone: (617) 621 7522
Email:



Jay Thornton's degree program was Mathematical Psychology. His doctoral work focused on perception and vision, and his thesis concerned channels mediating color vision. After a post doc at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked for Polaroid Corporation, first in the Vision Research Laboratory and then as manager of the Image Science Laboratory. At Polaroid he worked on problems in color reproduction, image quality, image processing, and half toning. At MERL since January 2002, he manages the Computer Human Observation project, and is excited about the computer vision problems that arise when computers analyze, measure, count, detect, and recognize people.

Recent Projects:

2-D Face Recognition
Aerial Terrain Mapping
Face Detection using Real-valued Hyperplanes
GPU for Surveillance
Media Retargeting
People Counting
Phase Unwrapping for Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
Time-Lapse Video Factorization

Recent Publications:

Sunkavalli, K; Matusik, W.; Pfister, H.; Rusinkiewicz, S., "Factored Time-Lapse Video", ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), ISSN:0730-0301, Vol. 26, Issue 3, Article 101, July 2007 (ACM Press)

Avidan, S.; Shamir, A., "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing", ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), ISSN:0730-0301, Vol. 26, Issue 3, Article 10, July 2007 (ACM Press, TR2007-087)

Porikli, F.; Thornton, J., "Shadow Flow: A Recursive Method to Learn Moving Cast Shadows", IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), ISSN: 1550-5499, Vol. 1, pp. 891-898, October 2005 (IEEE Xplore, TR2005-058)