The Robotics Institute

RI | Seminar | April 27, 2007

Robotics Institute Seminar, April 27, 2007
Time and Place | Seminar Abstract | Speaker Biography | Speaker Appointments

Watching People

 

 

David Forsyth

Professor

Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

Time and Place

 

Mauldin Auditorium (NSH 1305)
Refreshments 3:15 pm
Talk 3:30 pm


RoboCast

 

Abstract

 

There is a great need for programs that can describe what people are doing from video. This is difficult to do, because it is hard to identify and track people in video sequences, because we have no canonical vocabulary for describing what people are doing, and because the interpretation of what people are doing depends very strongly on what is nearby. Tracking is hard, because it is important to track relatively small structures that can move relatively fast --- for example, lower arms. I will describe research into kinematic tracking --- tracking that reports the kinematic configuration of the body --- that has resulted in a fairly accurate, fully automatic tracker, that can keep track of multiple people. Once one has tracked the body, one must interpret the results. One way to do so is to have a motion synthesis system that takes the track, and produces a motion that is (a) like a human motion and (b) close to the track. Our work has produced a high- quality motion synthesis system that can produce motions that look very much like human activities. I will describe work that couples that system with a tracker to produce a description of the activities, entirely automatically. It is often very difficult to obtain a rich set of examples of activities, because activities appear to compose in complex ways. I will describe methods to extract a representation of activity that can be searched with a text-like query. I will speculate on some of the many open problems. What should one report? How do nearby objects affect one's interpretation of activities? How can one interpret patterns of behaviour?

 

Speaker Biography

 
 

David Forsyth holds a BSc and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and an MA and D.Phil from Oxford University. He is currently a full professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, having served 10 years on the faculty at UC Berkeley.<./p> He has published over 100 papers on computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning. He served as program co-chair for IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2000, general co-chair for CVPR 2006, program co-chair for ECCV 2008, and is a regular member of the program committee of all major international conferences on computer vision. He has received best paper awards at the International Conference on Computer Vision and at the European Conference on Computer Vision, and an IEEE Technical Achievement award. His recent textbook, "Computer Vision: A Modern Approach" (joint with J. Ponce and published by Prentice Hall) is now widely adopted as a course text. 

 

Speaker Appointments

 
 

For appointments, please contact Janice Brochetti (janiceb@cs.cmu.edu)

The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.