News & Events

267 News items, Awards, Events or Talks found.


  •  NEWS    CIRP CMMO 2013: publication by Alan Sullivan and others
    Date: June 13, 2013
    Where: CIRP Conference on Modeling of Machining Operations (CIRP CMMO)
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The paper "Cutter Workpiece Engagement Calculations for Five-axis Milling using Composite Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields" by Erdim, H. and Sullivan, A. was presented at the CIRP Conference on Modeling of Machining Operations (CIRP CMMO).
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  •  TALK    Holistic Models for Visual Perception in Autonomous Systems
    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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  •  NEWS    ICRA 2013: publication by Yuichi Taguchi, Srikumar Ramalingam and others
    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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  •  NEWS    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: April 1, 2013
    Where: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The article "Support Vector Shape: A Classifier Based Shape Representation" by Nguyen, H. V. and Porikli, F. was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: February 14, 2013
    Where: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The article "Nonlinear Camera Response Functions and Image Deblurring: Theoretical Analysis and Practice" by Tai, Y-W, Chen, X., Kim, S., Kim, S.J., Li, F., Yang, J., Yu, J., Matsushita, Y. and Brown, M.S. was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
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  •  NEWS    ICMLA 2012: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: December 12, 2012
    Where: International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA)
    Research Area: Machine Learning
    Brief
    • The paper "Compressive Clustering of High-Dimensional Data" by Ruta, A. and Porikli, F. was presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA).
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  •  TALK    Sensitive Manipulation
    Date & Time: Thursday, November 15, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Eduardo Torres-Jara, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • This talk presents an alternative approach to robotic manipulation. In this approach, manipulation is mainly guided by tactile feedback as opposed to vision. The motivation behind this approach stems from the fact that manipulating an object necessarily implies coming into contact with it. As a result, directly sensing physical contact seems more important than vision to control the interaction of the object and the robot. In this work, the traditional approach of a highly precise arm guided by a vision system is replaced by one that uses a low mechanical impedance arm with dense tactile sensing and exploration capabilities.

      The robots OBRERO and GoBot have been built to implement this approach. We have developed a novel tactile sensing technology and mounted our sensors on the robots' hands. These sensors are biologically inspired and present adequate features for manipulation. The success of this approach is shown by picking up objects in a poorly modeled environment. This task, simple for humans, has been a challenge for robots. The robot can deal with new, unmodeled objects. Specifically, OBRERO can gently contact, explore, lift, and place an object in a different location. It can also detect basic slippage and external forces acting on an object while it is held. These tasks can be performed successfully with very light objects, without fixtures, and on slippery surfaces. Similarly, GoBot is capable of manipulating small objects such as the stones in the game GO. Both OBRERO and GoBot perform all of their manipulations using tactile feedback.
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  •  NEWS    ICPR 2012: publication by Ming-Yu Liu and others
    Date: November 11, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The paper "A Grassmann Manifold-based Domain Adaptation Approach" by Zheng, J., Liu, M.-Y., Chellappa, R. and Phillips, P.J. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR).
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  •  NEWS    ISMAR 2012: publication by Yuichi Taguchi, Srikumar Ramalingam and others
    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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  •  NEWS    PMI 2012: publication by Alan Sullivan and others
    Date: October 29, 2012
    Where: CIRP Conference on Process Machine Interactions (PMI)
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The paper "High Accuracy Computation of Geometric Properties of Cutter Workpiece Intersection using Distance Fields for NC Milling" by Erdim, H. and Sullivan, A. was presented at the CIRP Conference on Process Machine Interactions (PMI).
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  •  NEWS    3DIMPVT 2012: publication by Ming-Yu Liu and others
    Date: October 13, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Conference on 3D Imaging, Modeling, Processing, Visualization and Transmission (3DIMPVT)
    Research Area: Machine Learning
    Brief
    • The paper "Classification and Pose Estimation of Vehicles in Videos by 3D Modeling within Discrete-Continuous Optimization" by Hodlmoser, M., Micusik, B., Liu, M.-Y., Pollefeys, M. and Kaampel, M. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on 3D Imaging, Modeling, Processing, Visualization and Transmission (3DIMPVT).
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  •  NEWS    ECCV 2012: 3 publications by Yuichi Taguchi, Tyler W. Garaas, Srikumar Ramalingam, C. Oncel Tuzel and Amit K. Agrawal
    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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  •  NEWS    International Journal of Computer Vision: publication by Yuichi Taguchi and Srikumar Ramalingam
    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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  •  TALK    Challenges on shape acquisition of moving object
    Date & Time: Friday, August 17, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Hiroshi Kawasaki, Kagoshima University
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • In this talk, I will introduce an overview of my research projects on 3D shape acquisition of moving object. The talk mainly focuses on two parts, the first one is about our 3D shape acquisition technique using projector and camera system and the second is entire shape acquisition using multi-view pro-cam system. I also briefly cover the following topics:

      -- Theory of shape from coplanarity technique
      -- Texture recovery method on pro-cam system
      -- Future plan on medical application of our scanner

      Those researches are jointly researched by Prof. Katushi Ikeuchi (Univ. of Tokyo), Prof. Ryo Furukawa (Hiroshima city Univ) and Prof. Ryusuke Sagawa (AIST).
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  •  TALK    Applications of Mobile Augmented Reality and Pervasive Computing in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
    Date & Time: Tuesday, July 10, 2012; 11:00 AM
    Speaker: Prof Vineet Kamat, University of Michigan
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • This talk will present ongoing research at the University of Michigan Laboratory for Interactive Visualization in Engineering (LIVE) that is exploring applications of mobile pervasive computing and visualization in design, engineering, and construction. Findings from three specific research projects will be presented: Interactive Visualization of Construction Operations in Mobile Outdoor Augmented Reality; Rapid Building Damage Evaluation using Augmented Reality and Structural Simulation; and Location-Aware Contextual Information Access and Retrieval for Rapid On-Site Decision Making. In each case, the development of fundamental algorithms, their implementation as reusable and modular software, and their implementation in the engineering applications will be described.
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  •  TALK    Visual 3D/4D modeling of urban places and events
    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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  •  TALK    Toward Efficient and Robust Human Pose Estimation
    Date & Time: Tuesday, June 26, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Min Sun, University of Michigan
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • Robust human pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision in that body part configurations are often subject to severe deformations and occlusions. Moreover, efficient pose estimation is often a desirable requirement in many applications. The trade-off between accuracy and efficiency has been explored in a large number of approaches. On the one hand, models with simple representations (like tree or star models) can be efficiently applied in pose estimation problems. However, these models are often prone to body part misclassification errors. On the other hand, models with rich representations (i.e., loopy graphical models) are theoretically more robust, but their inference complexity may increase dramatically. In this talk, we present an efficient and exact inference algorithm based on branch-and-bound to solve the human pose estimation problem on loopy graphical models. We show that our method is empirically much faster (about 74 times) than the state-of-the-art exact inference algorithm [Sontag et al. UAI'08]. By extending a state-of-the-art tree model [Sapp et al. ECCV'10] to a loopy graphical model, we show that the estimation accuracy improves for most of the body parts (especially lower arms) on popular datasets such as Buffy [Ferrari et al. CVPR'08] and Stickmen [Eichner and Ferrari BMVC'09] datasets. Our method can also be used to exactly solve most of the inference problems of Stretchable Models [Sapp et al. CVPR'11] on video sequences (which contains a few hundreds of variables) in just a few minutes. Finally, we show that the novel inference algorithm can potentially be used to solve human behavior understanding and biological computation problems.
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  •  NEWS    CVPR 2012: 4 publications by Yuichi Taguchi, Srikumar Ramalingam and Amit K. Agrawal
    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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  •  NEWS    CIRP Conference on High Performance Cutting 2012: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: June 4, 2012
    Where: CIRP Conference on High Performance Cutting
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The paper "Offline Force Control and Feedrate Scheduling for Complex Free Form Surfaces in 5-Axis Milling" by Layegh, S.E., Erdim, H. and Lazoglu, I. was presented at the CIRP Conference on High Performance Cutting.
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  •  NEWS    Computer-Aided Design: publication by Ronald N. Perry, Alan Sullivan and others
    Date: June 1, 2012
    Where: Computer-Aided Design
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The article "High Accuracy NC Milling Simulation Using Composite Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields" by Sullivan, A., Erdim, H., Perry, R.N. and Frisken, S.F. was published in Computer-Aided Design.
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  •  NEWS    ICRA 2012: 3 publications by Yuichi Taguchi, Srikumar Ramalingam, Amit K. Agrawal, C. Oncel Tuzel and Ming-Yu Liu
    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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  •  NEWS    The International Journal of Robotics Research: publication by Yuichi Taguchi, Tim K. Marks, C. Oncel Tuzel, Ming-Yu Liu and others
    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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  •  TALK    Cooperative Cuts: Coupling Edges via Submodularity
    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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  •  NEWS    ICCP 2012: publication by Yuichi Taguchi, C. Oncel Tuzel, Amit K. Agrawal and others
    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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  •  NEWS    EUSAR 2012: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: April 1, 2012
    Where: European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR)
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The paper "SAR Despeckle Filtering by Sparse Coding on Affinity Nets (SCAN)" by Porikli, F., Sundaresan, R. and Suwa, K. was presented at the European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR).
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