Todd A. Williamson

I'm no longer a Robotics Ph.D. Student at Carnegie Mellon University. My defense was on September 25, 1998. I also no longer work at Cytometrics, Inc. I was manager of the image analysis group there, but I left as of February 1, 2000. They have since filed for bankruptcy. I currently work for a CMU spinoff company called Zaxel Systems, Inc. Check out my resume (also available as PDF).

Research Interests

I worked on the NavLab project at CMU, trying to make automobiles safer, faster and eventually more autonomous. My research involved using computer vision to locate obstacles (such as other cars, people, animals, and fallen objects) as a car drives on the highway. In order to accomplish this, I looked at combining one or more of the following computer vision techniques:

Multibaseline Stereo Vision
Optical Flow
Parallel Vision Hardware
Kalman Filters

Publications (in PDF format)

My thesis proposal, "A High-Performance Vision System for Obstacle Detection"
"A Specialized Multibaseline Stereo Technique for Obstacle Detection", (from CVPR '98)
"Detection of Small Obstacles at Long Range Using Multibaseline Stereo," (from IEEE Intelligent Vehicles '98) warning: this paper is formatted for A4 paper
"A High-Performance Vision System for Obstacle Detection", my dissertation (it's almost 4MB). Also available in Postscript (at a whopping 16MB)
"A Trinocular Stereo System for Highway Obstacle Detection," (from ICRA '99)

About Me

Here is a summary of where I've lived:

1968-1970 Harrisonville, Missouri
1970-1971 North Bergen, New Jersey
1971-1975 Cedar Grove, New Jersey
1975-1981 Montclair, New Jersey
1981-1985 Lubbock, Texas
1985-1994 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1994-1996 Tokyo, Japan
1996-1998 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1998-present Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I returned in September, 1996 from two years in Japan, working for SECOM Co, Ltd. (a medium-sized Japanese company that specializes in home and office security). While in Japan, I met my wife Hiroko. We were married on January 3, 1996, in Honolulu, Hawaii.