[Colloquium] 2/18 Talks at TTIC: Srikumar Ramalingam, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

[Mary Marre]

When:     Thursday, February 18th at 11:00 am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Srikumar Ramalingam, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
(MERL)


Title: Towards Holistic Scene Understanding from a Single Image

Abstract: The success of an autonomous driving system (mobile robot,
self-driving car) hinges on the accuracy and speed of inference algorithms
that are used in understanding and recognizing the 3D world. A unifying
theme of my research is the modeling of scene understanding problems via
the lens of probabilistic graphical models and the development of new
inference algorithms. In this talk, I will show novel algorithms for depth
estimation, semantic segmentation, and boundary classification from a
single image.  In particular, I will show a technique to solve the
classical and ill-posed single-view 3D reconstruction problem using
vanishing points, orthogonal structure, and a linear program that considers
all plausible connectivity constraints between lines. I will argue that by
developing a principled and general framework for transforming problems
with long-range interactions and complex dependencies (higher order
multi-label functions) to simpler formulations (pairwise Boolean
functions), we can use existing methods to solve these hard problems. In
doing so, I will also show transformations that are optimal with respect to
some properties such as submodularity (discrete analogue of convexity). I
will briefly highlight a few innovative and lightweight algorithms that
achieve state-of-the-art results on a variety of problems in the context of
autonomous driving.

Bio: Srikumar Ramalingam is a senior principal research staff at Mitsubishi
Electric Research Lab (MERL) since 2008. He received a Marie Curie
VisionTrain scholarship from European Union to pursue his doctoral studies
in computer science and applied mathematics at INRIA Rhone Alpes (France)
and he obtained his PhD in 2007 under the guidance of Dr. Peter Sturm. His
thesis on generic imaging models received INPG best thesis prize and AFRIF
thesis prize (honorable mention) from the French Association for Pattern
Recognition. He has published numerous papers in flagship conferences and
journals (CVPR, ICCV, SIGGRAPH ASIA, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS, TPAMI, and
IJCV), won several awards, coauthored a book, co-organized international
workshops, served as a guest editor for TPAMI, and given tutorials on
topics such as graphical models, multi-view geometry, and non-classical
cameras. His research interests are in computer vision, machine learning,
robotics, and autonomous driving.


Host: Matthew Walter, mwalter at ttic.edu






Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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