VASC Seminar Announcement ========================= Date: Thursday, 2/17/00 Time: 2:30:4:00 Place: outside of NSH 4113 Speaker: Jim Rehg, Cambridge Research Lab http://www.crl.research.digital.com/who/people/rehg/bio.htm Motion Capture from Movies Video is the primary archival source for human movement, with examples ranging from sports coverage of Olympic events to dance routines in Hollywood movies. The ability to reliably track the human figure in movie footage would unlock a large, untapped repository of motion data. Figure tracking using a single video source is a challenging problem due to the size of the state space, the presence of background clutter, and the loss of 3-D information. This talk describes recent progress on a framework for figure registration (2-D tracking) and some of its applications. In particular, we present new results in video editing and 3-D motion estimation. By coupling figure tracking and background registration we demonstrate automatic segmentation of figure from background in the presence of complex motions. Segmented figure and background layers are combined using Image-Based Rendering to achieve 3-D video editing effects. In addition, 3-D figure motion is reconstructed from 2-D measurements using a batch estimation technique. New results in reconstructing Fred Astaire dance sequences will be presented. BIO: Jim Rehg received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. He is currently at the Cambridge Research Lab of Compaq Computer Corp, where he leads the vision-based human sensing project.