[Colloquium] TTIC Colloquium: Sabine Süsstrunk, EPFL

[Liv Leader]

*REMINDER:*

When:             *Monday, February 14th @ 1*

Where:           * TTIC Conference Room #526*, 6045 S Kenwood Ave, 5th Floor

Who:              * Sabine Süsstrunk, *EPFL

Title:               * Improving the Visible with the Invisible:
Applications of visible/near-infrared imaging in Computational Photography
and Computer Vision*

With the advent of the Microsoft Kinect, which interprets 3D scene
information from a continuously-projected near-infrared (NIR) structured
light, the imaging community has taken a renewed interest in the power of
invisible information. Indeed, silicon-based digital camera sensors exhibit
significant sensitivity beyond the visible spectrum (400-700nm). They are
able to capture wavelengths up to 1100 nm, i.e., they are sensitive to
near-infrared radiation. This additional information is treated as noise in
conventional cameras and is absorbed by a NIR-blocking filter affixed to the
sensor.

We will show that retaining instead of removing NIR information can indeed
significantly improve certain computational photography and computer vision
tasks. Intrinsic properties of the NIR wavelength band guarantee that images
can be sharper, less affected by man-made colorants, and more resilient to
changing light conditions. We illustrate the benefits of using NIR images in
conjunction with standard color images in applications such as de-hazing,
skin rendering, single and multiple illuminant detection, shadow detection,
material-based segmentation, and scene recognition. The design of a camera
than can simultaneously capture visible and NIR information on one single
sensor will also be discussed.

Sabine Süsstrunk (http://ivrg.epfl.ch/~sabines/) is professor for Images and
Visual Representation at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
(EPFL), Switzerland, since 1999. Her main research areas are in
computational photography, color image processing and computer vision, image
quality, image indexing, and archiving. From 2003-2004, she was a Visiting
Scholar in the Computational Color Reproduction Group at Hewlett-Packard
Labs in Palo Alto, CA, USA. Prior to that, she was the Principle Imaging
Researcher at Corbis Corporation in Seattle, WA, USA. Sabine has authored or
co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed conference and journal articles.
Sabineis an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image
Processing and
served as chair or committee member in many international conferences on
color imaging, digital photography, and image systems engineering. She is an
area chair for CVPR 2011.

Host:             Mathieu Salzmann, salzmann at ttic.edu


-- 
Liv Leader
Faculty Services

Toyota Technological Institute
6045 S Kenwood Ave, #504
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone- (773) 834-2567
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Email-  lleader at ttic.edu <jam at ttic.edu>
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