Harvard University
Computer Science Colloquium Series
33 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138
Colloquium
From Pictures to Insights
Hanspeter Pfister
Senior research scientist, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and
visiting scholar at Harvard University.
http://www.merl.com/people/pfister/
Thursday, March 22, 2007
4:00PM
Maxwell Dworkin G125
(Ice Cream at 3:30PM - Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)
Abstract
As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But finding
the right words to describe a thousand pictures is very difficult.
Today, our ability to acquire image and video data far outstrips our
ability to make sense of that data. This is particularly true in the
sciences, where huge amounts of image data are acquired from scanners,
microscopes, telescopes, and various other instruments. For the past 20
years, visualization has focused on generating images from data. What is
now needed are better methods to generate abstractions that help us to
gain insights into large collections of image data.
In this talk I will make the argument that modern visualization
approaches require hierarchical data analysis to transform the data into
meaningful, perceptually intuitive representations. I will discuss a
number of data-driven hierarchical representations that tame the
complexity of high-dimensional visual data. First, I will address the
representation of spatially-varying appearance using a tree-structured
factorization method and a new matrix decomposition algorithm. Then I
will show how to generalize these ideas to decompose time-lapse video
into simple and intuitive components that can be edited. Next, I will
discuss the MERL face-scanning project, where we collected a database of
over 400 subjects with thousands of images each in order to build
high-quality statistical models of human faces. Finally, I will briefly
describe the Connectome, an ongoing project with the Harvard Center for
Brain Science, which aims to determine the detailed neural circuitry of
the brain from nanoscale-resolution images.
Host: Professor Steven Gortler
_______________________________________________
Colloquium mailing list
Colloquium(a)deas.harvard.edu
https://lists.deas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/colloquium
_______________________________________________
iic-seminars mailing list
iic-seminars(a)calists.harvard.edu
http://calists.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-seminars