[Theory] 2/10 Talks at TTIC: Soumyadip Sengupta, University of Washington

[Mary Marre]

*When:*        Thursday, February 10th at* 11:00 am CT*


*Where:       *Talk will be given *live, in-person* at

                   TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue

                   5th Floor, Room 530


*Where:*      Zoom Virtual Talk (*register in advance here
<https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_e2mZ2jQIQ3-XQz4eabvcMA>*)


*Who: *        Soumyadip Sengupta, University of Washington

*Title:         *Inverse Graphics for Next-Gen Video Communication

*Abstract: *Video communication connects our world. The ongoing global
pandemic has highlighted the necessity of video as a medium for virtual
education, tele-health, business, political discourse, and creative
contents. However, the visual quality of these videos significantly lack
that of the professionally created videos captured with expensive equipment
and edited with human expertise. In this talk, I will discuss my ongoing
research on creating next-gen video communication and content creation
framework by democratizing high-quality video production and editing. To
improve various components of a video computationally (e.g. change
lighting, replace the background etc.), we first need to infer those
intrinsic components of the video related to the 3D world, and then edit
them. This problem, which is often known as Inverse Graphics, is a
holy-grail problem in Computer Vision. It is computationally challenging
and severely under-constrained. To solve Inverse Graphics for democratizing
video production, my research adopts a unique user-centric and personalized
AI based approach. I will first discuss how simple user interaction
strategies, such as capturing an extra image, can help us perform
high-quality background replacement in real-time. Then, I will discuss how
we can personalize AI models by training on the data of a specific user
captured by their webcam to improve lighting.

*Bio: *Soumyadip Sengupta is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Paul G.
Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
Washington, Seattle. He is affiliated with GRAIL (Graphics and Imaging
Laboratory), working with Steve Seitz, Brian Curless, and Ira
Kemelmacher-Shlizerman. He did his Ph.D. under the supervision of David
Jacobs at University of Maryland, College Park and graduated in 2019. His
research interest lies at the intersection of Computer Vision and Computer
Graphics, with a focus on solving Inverse Graphics for democratizing
high-quality video production. His work on Background Matting received Best
Student Paper Honorable Mentions at CVPR 2021 (Top 7 papers out of 1600
accepted) and has been adopted by various companies, e.g. Microsoft, Inter
State Studio, etc. More information can be found on his webpage
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~soumya91/.
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~soumya91/&sa=D&source=calendar&ust=1644451726101689&usg=AOvVaw34Fn9X270B0qVua1Bptf_->

*Host: **Greg Shakhnarovich* <greg at ttic.edu>




Mary C. Marre
Faculty Administrative Support
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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