16-421: Vision Sensors, Spring 2009


General Information

Time :  Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30 pm  -- 2:50 pm

Location: Porter Hall A20A (NOTE CLASS ROOM CHANGE!!)

Credits :   12

Pre-requisites : Linear (or Matrix) algebra, OR any Vision or Graphics course, OR Instructors Permission 


Instructor 

Srinivasa Narasimhan 

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srinivas

Email: srinivas@cs.cmu.edu

Office: NSH 4117

Office Hours: By appointment


Overview





This course covers the fundamentals of vision cameras and other sensors - how they function, how they are built, and how to use them effectively. The course presents a journey through the fascinating five hundered year history of "camera-making" from the early 1500's "camera obscura" through the advent of film and lenses, to today's mirror-based and solid state devices (CCD, CMOS). The course includes a significant hands-on component where students learn how to use the sensors and understand, model and deal with the uncertainty (noise) in their measurements. While the first half of the course deals with conventional "single viewpoint" or "perspective" cameras, the second half of the course covers much more recent "multi-viewpoint" or "multi-perspective" cameras that includes a host of lenses and mirrors.


Lectures and Readings


Assignments


List of Topics



Grading



[Acknowledgements] A significant part of this course is similar to the courses offered at Stanford (Pat Hanrahan, Marc Levoy, Ron Fediw), UC San Diego (Henrik Wann Jensen), Columbia (Shree Nayar, Peter Belhumeur, Ravi Ramamoorthi), UW Madison (Chuck Dyer), UWash (Steve Seitz), Utah (Pete Shirley), Rutgers (Kristin Dana), Cornell (Steve Marschner, Kavita Bala), Technion (Yoav Schechner), Princeton (Szymon Rusinkiewicz), MIT (Ted Adelson, Ramesh Raskar, Bill Freeman), Drexel (Ko Nishino), TU Berlin and Deutsch Telecom (Rahul Swaminathan) The instructor thanks the instructors of these courses for the materials (slides, content) used in this course. In addition, several photographs and illustrations are borrowed from internet sources. The instructor thanks them all.

[Permission to use/modify materials] The instructor gladly gives permission to use and modify any of the slides for academic and research purposes. Since a lot of the material is borrowed from other sources, please acknowledge the original sources too. Finally, since this is a continuously evolving course, all suggestions and corrections (major, minor) are welcome!