[Colloquium] REMINDER: 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 for autonomous driving


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 and semantic segmentation 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 show transformations that are optimal with
respect to some properties such as submodularity (discrete analogue of
convexity). I will conclude by showing a few innovative and lightweight
algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art results in the context of
autonomous driving.


Bio: Srikumar Ramalingam is a senior principal research scientist 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). He received 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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